One has to chuckle at the Telegraph’s “exclusive” report today. There is nothing in it that hasn’t been abundantly obvious for quite some time. Once again, there won’t be anything new or surprising to readers of this particular Substack. Restore Britain has very much soiled its own nest.

The stand-out quote from the report is this one… “According to one senior party figure: “This problem is systemic in the party. I think it’s been there from inception. I think that when the party transitioned from being a think tank into being a party, certain individuals brought with them a big online following who were the core initial membership, and they boosted the numbers – and I think that’s where the rot set in, in the form of these so-called ethnonationalists, racists, and anti-Semites. I think that they have agency at the centre of the party.”"

Shocked. Shocked I tell you!! But the report also delves deeper in to the row surrounding Pink Ladies activist, Orla Minihane, who describes a rather vile misogynistic culture within the party. It does tally with my experience of these people - but Restore supporters are now insisting Minihane brought a torrent of abuse upon herself by voicing support for Lindsay Clancy (which she categorically didn’t).

Moreover, none of this bickering started with Orla Minihane. From the outset, Restore set out to attract the very grotbags who were always going to rock the boat. From day one they wanted the party to be more of a doctrinal ethno-nationalist party, and never intended on supporting it for what it actually is.

Under the surface they were already complaining that Alistair Harrison (Lowe’s right hand man) is a Zionist, and some of its lead activists in Makerfield were known antisemites that the party turned a blind eye to. They've since been outraged by the appointment of Howard Cox and Henry Bolton because they are "cringe boomer civnats" and eventually turned on the Orla Minihane for having the audacity to suggest that we have an obligation to all girls to prevent abuse and FGM.

They've not been subtle about where they stand. They've been shitting the bed for Restore for months on end, and they were always going to take their bat home. They were never going to allow the party to proceed on any basis other than their own ideology - which runs counter to that of Rupert Lowe, who is seemingly oblivious to what is going on under his nose.

They've been so obnoxious that they've actively repelled a lot of good and serious people from joining. My hunch is that the appointment of Henry Bolton was an attempt to rebalance the top team for this very reason. Only it hasn't worked, because they hounded Orla Minihane with a torrent of abuse, making it quite clear their attitudes to women in general.

Certainly Minihane could have handled the fallout better, but none of this was instigated by her. She was forced out fundamentally because she is viewed as a civnat (i.e. not a terrible human being).

While Steve Laws et al have now left the party, so has Minihane, taking her politically productive campaign group with her, having been completely abandoned by Rupert Lowe - meaning that quite a lot of decent people now want nothing to do with the party, while the very online ethnat brigade are now determined to destroy Restore.

As such, the Telegraph report suggesting there has been an ethnat takeover is not strictly accurate. The party is still essentially an oblivious Rupert Lowe, along with Beavis and Butthead (Messers Pitt and Downes), presiding over ever more ridiculous factional infighting - that they could have avoided had they not wooed the grotbags in the first place. They who were doing to Restore what they've done to every other political entity they've ever been involved with.

What's left now is a badly mauled and tainted fringe party, and nobody even understands who they are or what they're actually for. Having made an enemy of Talk TV, GB News, The Spectator, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and half the staffers at The Times, all they've got now is a feral twitter account run by god knows who, trotting out hackneyed mantras in the hope of peeling off some of Reform's dwindling support base.

All of this could and should have been avoided, but the running of the party was entrusted to morons, and cheered on by the Lotus Eaters dickheads - and now I don't think even the most gifted political strategist could salvage it.

The Telegraph goes on to say:

A senior branch official blamed Mr Lowe for a total lack of control at the top of the party, saying: “A millionaire has bought a sweetshop and left the children in charge.” None of those who spoke to The Telegraph believed that Mr Lowe shared the ethnonationalist beliefs of his most extreme members, but they were clear that if he did not act soon, he would see an exodus of the more sensible members.

One senior activist said: “I would like a piece to camera [from Rupert] absolutely stating that the party is not ethnonationalist… stating the position on ethnicity and skin colour, and also saying that we have no truck with racism, anti-Semitism… ethno-nationalism, any of it… and to also say that anybody in the party that’s found out to be partaking of this is going to be thrown out on their ear and made an example of.”

So far, there has been no sign that Mr Lowe is minded to go down that route, meaning the bullies are winning. As one Restore member put it: “It’s sick and it’s scary, because you’re sitting thinking: OK, well, I’m next. The minute my views or my tone doesn’t seem to fit, you can pretty much guess you’re next.”

This has been the central dysfunction from the beginning. Lowe set out on a principle of not denouncing his own supporters, believing the worst of them to be the average Tommy Robinson fan club member, oblivious to the fact that the people he was attracting really aren’t the sort of people you want to be seen making excuses for.

This is precisely what should have been addressed by publishing a formal definition, and setting their values out clearly, with the main X account taking its cues from party documentation. But as I’ve hopefully demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt now, the party is run by idiots.

If the party is to survive, it has a lot of work to do and it will take a long time to shake off a lot of the stink. I suspect, though, that the people involved don’t have the skill to pull it off. Crafting a party ideology that fits with the politics of Rupert Lowe, to the right of Reform that doesn’t wade into this particular sewer, takes a kind of structured thinking that isn’t generally found on the Slop Right.

Moreover, fixing it starts with the leadership of the party realising that there is a problem. On present trajectory, Restore might not even exist a year from now.

The port blockade protest in Portsmouth over the weekend has caused a number of ripples over the last couple of days - not least widespread antipathy towards the RNLI - the cause of much establishment media revulsion.

To my mind, it makes perfect sense to protest the RNLI’s actions. The NGOcracy is the soft underbelly of the regime, and protest is a means to draw them into a political battle they would rather not be part of. Nobody should get a free pass and they shouldn’t expect an easy life if they want to continue operating the way they are.

Illegal immigrants quite deliberately put themselves in peril, with the full knowledge of the French (which is not "innocent passage" as defined in international maritime law) - and it is an operational decision on the part of the RNLI to go and collect them. As such, they are part of the smuggler's business model by choice, thus a legitimate target for protest.

Leaving aside that the RNLI is fraudulent, parasitic organisation, using its fleet of boats as a shop window for its fundraising (to funnel money into its self-serving bureaucracy), its activities are now actively harmful.

Protest will cause them, and the police, to divert their resources into security and new operating procedures, which is not what they want to do. That is the object of protest - forcing organisations to do things they would rather not (not least wading into politics).

This is of limited effect, but it’s the only real soft target, so you have to pick your battles accordingly. In conjunction with other protests like the one we saw in Portsmouth, it makes it more operationally complicated. It caused diversions of RNLI boats which used up time, and fuel, and forced a formal executive response from the organisation.

What we now have to do is make it clear that we do not accept their excuses. We have seen that French rescue boats operate a hands-off approach, and we expect the same of the RNLI. It has no business making itself a part of the smuggler’s business model - especially not in calm seas.

To that end, it requires regular and persistent protest. One of the effects of this, at some point, is that the RNLI executive, tone deaf as they are, will retreat further into the NGOcracy narrative, indicating they have chosen to side with the enemy, which legitimatises calls for the RNLIs charitable status to be revoked. If the organisation no longer exists to serve the British people then it should not exist at all.

As far as protest actions go, I’d say this on in particular has been a resounding success and if it can be replicated with more men on hand then we are looking at a movement that can actually achieve something where the political parties have failed.

Next up, though, we’ll get a stern editorial from The Times lamenting the toxicity of the national debate where a cherished institution like the RNLI has come under fire. It did not, however, become toxic in a vacuum. We have watched a steady stream of invaders for YEARS now while five consecutive prime ministers have allowed it to happen.

I appreciate that democracy is often slow and bureaucratic, and it is incumbent on citizens to have faith in the process and be patient, there simply aren't any signs that this or any future administration is serious about bringing it to an end. That necessarily demands a shift of rhetoric and tactics, because the politicians have heard our message and we have seen their reply.

We told them we did not want any more illegals. They keep shipping them in. We said we didn't want them put up in hotels. So they moved them out of hotels and into our communities. They have since admitted they are aware of the dangers and this does not inform their actions at all.

Furthermore, they have built up an iron curtain around their operations and coerced local media into silence, which necessitate citizen journalists, to which their response has been to clamp down even further, and arresting protesters who expose their operations. Meanwhile, we see government signing long term contracts with suppliers and service providers which is a clear indication that they do not intend to put an end to it. It is a further insult now that we know that only a tiny fraction fo asylum applications are genuine.

As such, the state has abandoned the democratic social contract, while expecting the public to keep up their side of that contract. That is not how contracts work. If the contract is no longer upheld then the public is entitled to choose its own remedies. For now that means "toxic" rhetoric and unruly protest. That's the market signal (the warning) which the state is still choosing to ignore. It can only unravel further for here - but that is a deliberate choice on the part of the parasites who rule over us.

A fly in the ointment, though, is that any street movement has a tendency to attract grifters. I don't know if that is necessarily true of Danny Tommo but he certainly hasn't done himself any favours in launching a go-fund-me today. It's not good optics. I'm going to need to see more results before I endorse him more than I already have.

That said, once you put yourself on the line like this, there is no going back to working a normal job and you spend the rest of your time under intense police and media scrutiny, bogged down in legal paperwork with the constant threat of imprisonment. It's not a pleasant life.

I have some small insight into what they go through because I've had my fair share of hate mail in the post, unwelcome media intrusion, police visits, and psychopathic abuse from the left. After my arrest I am still never wholly at peace in my own home if there is a knock on the door.

On that basis, I don't really give a shit if these lads make a million for themselves with crowdfunding, on the proviso that they actually deliver the goods. This is why I couldn’t care less if Tommy Robinson is coining it. It’s nice to have the money but it certainly isn’t nice having to live with all the bullshit that goes with it. Money might buy him a few nice things, but he will never know peace and privacy in his own homeland ever again.

The benchmark, this time, is that they actually achieve something. I am not especially impressed with Tommy Robinson's light entertainment roadshows in London because all they do is soak up money that could be put to better uses, and don't really accomplish very much.

If, however, Robinson/Tommo, or some other hard man, can put several thousand men on the approach roads to the ports (to the extent of overwhelming police capacity), then we might actually get somewhere. That will enjoy my wholehearted support - to the extent that I'll donate whatever I can. When you put yourself in a position of high profile political leadership, you can never work a normal job again. Leadership comes with real costs, and it is not unreasonable that leaders of a street movement should be paid to the extent their basic life expenses and legal costs are met.

Since there is currently no formal fund or mechanism to pay them, crowdfunding is a legitimate source where individuals can decide for themselves how much to pay them. I don't begrudge them of it if they get results.

One thing I think we need is a new Patriot's Union (not dissimilar to FSU) that will handle things like legal fees for protestors, so that it doesn't end up being dodgy crowd funders that grubby individuals can make off with and bring the movement into disrepute. It would need to be run by people with a spotless record with a proven track record of handling large sums of money.

The aim should be to build up a legal team that has our backs and is sympathetic to our aims - and one which can eventually finance a political party in the same way that the leftist unions prop up Labour. This could actually be something useful that Rupert Lowe could do. Restore members should lobby their leadership to do this because all of us are going to need it eventually. FSU is great, but we're going to need a union that does not equivocate on partisan issues.

One thing that’s clear is that party politics will get us nowhere. All of my political instincts tell me that Reform is toast. It might take another six months or so to play out, but Farage is untenable whether he stays or goes - and the party will struggle to hold together without him. Yusuf is very far from universally liked either by the parliamentary party or the membership, and if the party ends up led by a Tory defector then the mainstream right starts to look like what it is. A factional Tory civil war.

It is at this point when all the financial backers start to peel away because they won’t get a return on their investment, and being associated with the party is too reputationally hazardous.

What’s more, this latest scandal is a shot of adrenaline for Reform’s opponents who now smell blood in the water. They know that tactical voting with the help of their friends in the media, they can knock Reform out of the game so far as forming a government, or becoming the official opposition is concerned.

From there, the only direction for Reform is down and out, unless by some miracle they can find competent, presentable leadership that can rebuild. That, though, is not going to happen because slopulism tends not to attract serious people. In all of its time of existing, I can count on one hand the number of people in the party who are actually credible, with three fingers to spare.

That, then, raises the question of whether Restore Britain can step into the breach. Let me save you some time. They can’t - because they are similarly unprofessional and unserious. They may already be holed below the waterline, and can only exist as a noisy right wing faction - capable only of splitting the vote and handing seats to Labour.

As such, the Tories are the only vaguely right wing entity in the running, and in my view should be kept as far away from power as possible because they are still essentially aligned with the centrist consensus. The moment Badenoch put Beavis and Butthead in charge of defence and foreign policy was the moment she let us know that she does not want the right wing vote.

That is why we now need to look at democratic means other than voting to get what we want - which is going to require our own unions and a mass street protest movement that is actually willing to cause a real nuisance. It means rubbing shoulders with “far right thugs” whether we like it or not, and it does mean going up against NGOs like the RNLI and other blob organisations.

Essentially, we have to shift it up a gear and do all the things we would rather not do, and learn the lessons from successful left wing street campaigns. Our inability to put a coherent political party together combined with the weight of establishment opposition means that we are wasting our time at the ballot box. Either we get organised as a people’s movement now, without the corruption and stupidity of the people we’ve had as leaders, or simply accept that the game is up.

I don’t know about you but I don’t really have much time for YouTube politics stuff, but the above video is certainly worth it. It’s a complete vindication of everything I’ve said about Restore Britain. Orla Minihane, Spokeswoman for the Pink Ladies movement, and party ambassador for women and girls, has been hounded out of Restore Britain by the very online grotbag faction I’ve been warning about.

Minihane explains in detail what happened, and having witnessed much of it, I can say with confidence that her version is true.

This, though, was wholly expected. Not only are the the grotbag faction comically bigoted and profoundly antisemitic, they are also rabid misogynists - which is extremely bad news for a party that was already going to struggle to attract women. A party can scarcely bang the drum about rape gangs and “protecting our women” when they themselves have such appalling attitudes.

While Minihane has made a number of subsequent communication missteps, the party should have realised that they needed her (and the supporters she will no doubt take with her in the wake of this). They needed to back their own spokeswoman, but were evidently too worried about keeping the grotbag faction on side (who were already agitating for the removal of Henry Bolton).

The problem here is that Restore Britain set out with the view that it was not going to disavow any of its support base. Lowe was right insofar as Tommy Robinson supporters were concerned, but I think he underestimated just how toxic the grotbag right really are (while his own lieutenants pandered to them).

As I remarked the other day, this was a consequence of not fending them off at the very beginning with a formal party definition. While the party has taken some steps to correct this, they’ve probably left it too late. The reputational harm is already done, and the Tommy Robinson supporting patriot crowd have got their number. They like Rupert Lowe. They do not like the company he’s keeping.

Various accounts on X claim that Reform’s grubby dealings, and events over the weekend at Dover, have seen a surge in Restore membership, but Restore is now having the same churn problems that Reform (and formerly Ukip) has. Blistering public rows, backstabbing and infighting are not a good look for a party that’s supposed to be the credible alternative to Reform.

On the whole, neither of the Slop Right parties are faring particularly well in the public eye right now. Reform may also be on the brink of a civil war as the question of succession increasingly pops up. Neither party looks like it knows what it’s doing, and neither looks like a viable prospect for government. The dissident right is in freefall and is unable to hold it together until 2029. Increasingly it looks like party politics is not the answer.

West Bank settlements are a wearisome subject to have to write about, but it is relevant to the UK debate at the moment. I'm not one to wag the finger at Israel on this matter. I consider it 100% an internal affair. It is, however, much more nuanced than is presented in the UK press.

Israeli settlers on the West Bank have become a law unto themselves, often finding themselves in conflict with the IDF itself, and there is a lot of domestic Israeli opposition to the behaviour of settlers. Where it gets murky is that there actions are not officially sanctioned, but there are factions within the Netanyahu administration who encourage it. It will continue to be a running sore in Israeli politics as the West Bank turns to chaos.

While I do not personally approve of the conduct of the settlers (I regard them as thugs), Israeli absorption of the West Bank is an inevitability - and in the long term, its Arab inhabitants will be better off for it. The only way these ethno-religious spats ever resolve is when one side comprehensively wins. I am also of the view that it is as necessary as it is inevitable. An essential component of any nation state, Israel especially, is secure and defensible borders.

This absorption, though, runs counter to the "international community" position, endorsed by the British government, that there should be a two state solution. Muttering about the two state solution is the default throat clearing exercise before chastising Israel for whatever reason.

In reality, though, a Palestinian state in the West Bank is not something within anyone's gift. It has to be built from the ground up, and in all this time there has never been any serious attempt on the part of the Palestinians to build one because they've always been preoccupied with wiping Israel off the map. There is no good reason why Israel should assist its enemies in formalising a hostile state on its own doorstep - especially not one that could be sued as a staging point for an invasion that could cut Israel in two. There is precedent for this, and so Israel's posture is entirely understandable.

As such, when braindead British politicians yet again chastise Israel in order to curry favour with their own Islamist electoral hinterlands, and having recognised the state of Palestine in the wake of 7/10 (a hostile act if ever there were one), you can't be at all surprised if Israeli attitudes towards Britain sour somewhat.

I am even less surprised, then, to see certain elements within Israeli politics recognising Argentina's bogus claim to the Falklands. Javier Milei has been a full throated advocate of Israel while Britain and Europe has been mealy mouthed and cowardly. This is short-sighted being that Argentina could just as easily revert to its basketcase leftist norm.

It has, however, become germane to the right wing debate in Britain, in that some are reading this bickering over the Falklands as justification for pre-existing animosity towards Israel and Jews in general. Certain factions of the Netanyahu administration are not making any friends and are burning a lot of bridges.

Personally, I don't read too much into it. Most of the posturing is for domestic Israeli electoral purposes. Meanwhile, I don't have to like its current government to still recognise that Israel has a right to exist, and has a right to defensible borders, or recognise that the two state solution, if ever it was viable, is long dead now. If not before 7/10, then certainly on that day when Hamas went on a rape-murder spree. Nobody is obliged to hand those scumbags a state.

As such, the obnoxious conduct of Israeli settlers is little more than a sub-regional public order problem, and hardly of interest. Were it that British politics was functioning properly, this issue would not register in our discourse at all.

There is only one reason it is of any interest to the British government and that is to shore up its Islamic support in the Northern slums because it has lost the support of the native working class. Little wonder, then, that the White House is less than impressed, and Britain faces US trade penalties if it goes ahead with an unenforceable ban on settler goods. Labour now has to decide whether it values Palestinians more than it values trade with the US. But as we know, for Labour, the prosperity of the British people will always come last in their priorities.

It’s almost a year to the day since I launched manifestoproject.org. It feels like an eternity ago. It’s evolved quite considerably since I started it. As a political endeavour, though, it has been an abject failure. Perhaps it is down to my lack of powers of persuasion, but the point that political parties should have a firm intellectual foundation and stress tested policies has not landed with any of them.

All the same, it is a useful thought exercise in its own right and one I will continue with for its own sake. But I must confess, I am totally done with party politics. I have only ever devoted time to analysing them in the hope that one of them might eventually present as a serous party - and I think we can put that notion firmly to bed now. I could very easily wash my hands of it all.

Events over the weekend, though, have changed the mood. We saw a paramilitary styled protest in Dover and a much larger mobilisation in Portsmouth last night as the RNLI brought in hundreds more migrants.

This has the Slop Right parties falling over themselves to capitalise on it (while also taking the time, quite bizarrely, to condemn it). I suppose that is just the nature of politicians. For Reform it serves as an immediate distraction from Donor-gate, but they’re away with the fairies if they think that one is going away any time soon. These dinghy migrant stories have a tendency to drop out of the news within a day or two, whereas a corruption scandal will run and run.

The Portsmouth incident, however, changes things up a gear. It’s put a new player on the map. Danny Tommo has shown exceptional leadership skills in putting it together and ensuring it passed without any major incident. The blockade eventually dispersed after the police issued a Section 14 notice, and Tommo explained, quite correctly, that there was no point in getting his men arrested for no useful purpose. He explained that the migrant coaches could have been stopped, but he would need a lot more men to do it. That was essentially a call to arms - and one that has not fallen on deaf ears.

It is clear now that there is no party political solution to this. The right cannot unite on the basis of a political ideology (which is necessary for a functioning political party) but it can unite on the streets if there are very specific objectives. That’s where we’ll win this.

Already there’s already a lot of sniping on X at @RealDannyTommo, not least because of his colourful criminal background, but let me be clear. I don’t care. This is the first sign of genuine leadership I’ve seen for a very long time, and if he calls for British men to rally for an actual purpose, I will be there.

I am not interested in any more family friendly jamborees in London. I am done with bullshit micro parties and slopulist chancers. I have had it with party politics. We have endured insult after calculated insult. I am not waiting until 2029 so I can meekly drop my ballot paper in a box and hope for the best. We have made our feelings known to the government and we heard their reply. Now we have to make them understand who is actually in charge here. It’s not them. We own the streets.

I concur with Danny Tommo that this movement must be non-violent, but at the same time, they have to know we are serious. Each of us must be prepared to step outside our comfort zone and put something on the line.

What I can tell you is that we cannot do this through individual actions. They can pick us off one by one - arresting us, confiscating our assets, jailing us if needs be. But they can’t come after all of us, and we only win if we mobilise. What’s at stake here is the future of our country and the safety of our people.

But democracy is also on the line here. The state is already beefing up its policing and surveillance, because they would rather go to war with the British people than enforce the borders.

None of us wants this. We’d all rather just be left alone to live our lives in peace - but the British government is removing that option by the day. Soon even the remotest parts of Britain will wake up to discover they are no longer safe in their own communities - and will realise they’ve sleepwalked into a dictatorship. We cannot let them do this to us. The line must be drawn here.

It is not yet clear how Farage-gate will affect Reform in the polls. The party faithful are holding the line, which is about what you’d expect from a cult of personality, and many will still vote Reform just because they see it as the only means to break the “uni-party”. Loyalties have been entrenched for years.

What we do know is that Reform’s headline numbers have been fairly static for a while now, and the party has suffered a slow bleed. Their shtick is wearing thin and this latest debacle is only just heating up. The media will not let this one go.

That is a problem for Reform because when polls are deadlocked, the fight in politics is for every last floating voter and a major sleaze scandal has pretty much capped any future growth. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them backsliding by an average of two percent over the next week or so, falling into third place.

That’s bloody serious. Look at Reform’s vote distribution and a two percent backslide wipes out their chances in several seats, killing any chance of becoming the official opposition, and terminating any hope of one day forming a government.

Worse still, the worst of the media storm hasn’t even begun for Reform MPs. They are all in the shit because now they’re all complicit in the excuses. They’ve all said things on camera that they’ll have to row back on. From here on in, the only questions Farage and Reform will be asked are about this mess. Tice will also be under very close scrutiny. This simply will not go away until Farage resigns. That’s the price. And now Reform is utterly screwed.

It is then further screwed because only Tice or Yusuf can replace Farage, and Tice is a joke of a man. A game-show host without a game show. And then there’s Yusuf. He goes over well with the party base, but he’s antagonistic and prickly, and he’s an intellectual lightweight. He believes his own bullshit. The public will not warm to him. He doesn’t have Farage’s cad factor.

There’s only one real beneficiary of this, and it’s Kemi Badenoch, because any remotely sensible Reform supporter will conclude that you simply cannot rebuild anything viable out of what’s left of the party. It might not show up in the polls for a while, but as an organisation, it’s done for. Anyone in the ranks who’s been close to Farage during this time will have to step down — then it will start leaking like a sieve, and then they’ll be fighting like rats in a sack. McMurdock might even bail to Restore. I wouldn’t blame him, and I recommend that he does.

I can’t say when Farage will go, but he’s already doing the preparatory briefing. It could be three months from now, or it could be tomorrow. But his political life is coming to an end. He was already on the ropes over the crypto donations, and that investigation hasn’t even concluded yet. More than likely there will be a criminal investigation into this latest scandal. Farage might worm his way out from under, but Orr and Jukes are in very deep shit.

Ironically, Reform might have survived this were Starmer still in charge, given his massive unpopularity. But Burnham is still enjoying his honeymoon bounce, and Reform was already losing ground to the Tories. Detestation of “the uni-party” might keep them in the game for a while, but not to any useful purpose. Jenrick might not even keep his seat, and it smells to me like Braverman’s career is already over. As for Kruger, he just looks bewildered and out on his own, quietly regretting the mess he’s waded into. He’s done too - not least because he’s been found out. He is not the intellectual pillar he’s billed as. On that basis, Reform goes out with a quiet whimper.

This may be to Restore’s advantage, but not by much. At best, it will put them at 12% in the polls, and they will quietly recede from there. I don’t think Restore has it in them to salvage their public image. Lowe is out of his depth and Downes is an intellectual thug. There are no other big guns they can bring to bear. Thirty years of movement building, all destroyed in a single weekend — and all thanks to Farage. It was never going to play.

This, of course, will be cause for much celebration on the left, but I don’t think they understand the implications. Leaving aside for a moment that this sting operation was an ambush Reform walked into entirely of their own volition, more than likely dealing a crippling blow to the party from which it may never recover, it was still an establishment media hit-job. It was a level of scrutiny that will never be applied to Labour.

There should be no doubt that Channel 4 was acting on behalf of the establishment to take out a threat to the status quo and to protect the power of the incumbent regime. It was a very professionally executed political assassination.

While the blame still lies squarely on Farage’s shoulders, Channel 4 have gone to extraordinary lengths to do this. Investigations like this are not done on the cheap, and a transnational “civil society” blob organisation is bankrolling it: powerful vested interests who have gone all out to eliminate the preferred vehicle of the disenfranchised working class.

If they’ve succeeded in taking out Reform (and I really think they have this time) they’ve sent a not-so-subtle message that they have the power, which they will not hesitate to use, to ensure a right-wing populist party does not have a legitimate path to power. That is something of a game-changer. It puts us in uncharted waters. It tells us that party politics, as a means of achieving change, is over.

Many of us have understood this for years, not least because of the right’s inherent inability to organise itself into something cohesive and competent (one of the chief barriers being Farage himself). But this is the final nail in the coffin of the democratic process.

They cannot stop the change that’s coming, but now they’ve just ensured it will not be done through the ballot box. It will be done in the streets, and it will not be pretty. What we saw in Dover yesterday was just a taster. For the last few years we’ve seen disparate ad hoc protests at migrant camps and in the town squares, all easily corralled and contained, but eventually it will be happening everywhere, all at once.

Moreover, an ineffectual lightweight like Andy Burnham will be no more equipped to handle it than Starmer was. This is so far outside his margin of expectation, and they have no answers except the same clumsy tone-deaf rhetoric and the same corrosive two-tier policing. If they wanted an all-out war, they’ve certainly got one now.

That is where the party collapse and the street politics meet. From here, you’re going to see a lot more manifestations of what we saw in Dover yesterday, and if you’re a middle-of-the-road conservative, you’re not going to like the politics it represents. It’s an ugly side of politics.

Among their number are radicalised fanatics, Christian nationalists and outright fascists - and while generally well-behaved right now, it is going to attract thugs. I’m not talking about Tommy Robinson supporters and the Reform-adjacent. I’m talking about proper grotbags. This is something most of you haven’t seen before, and never at this scale. Get used to it.

What you’re seeing is the consequence of political failure. You’re seeing young and angry men with uncertain futures who can see that the party system is a dead end. The mainstream right has shunned them for the sake of optics and playing “the game”, but it’s a game that does not yield results. Patience goes unrewarded. The game is rigged and time is short. This is a gear-shift in politics, because the political process does not work.

These are not people with whom I have much in common. The ones I know of are pretty shitty people, and quite a few of them are belligerent and quite a bit thick — who cannot be reasoned with, and who could very easily become quite dangerous. But there’s also a shrewdness to them and how they operate. This is proto-IRA territory, albeit in the very early stages.

This will follow a similar dynamic, where there’ll be mealy-mouthed condemnations, but even quite well-off and middle-class normies will tacitly approve of what they do. I don’t much like them or their politics, but I’m not going to condemn it for as long as it remains peaceful. I’m content to let them take a run at it and see what they can do, because I don’t see a normal political avenue that will work. We’re past all that.

We’ve now reached a point where there simply has to be a response to the sheer arrogance of the British state. It is one thing for them to take their time in finding operational solutions to the dinghy crisis, and God knows, we have waited long enough — but to move them out of hotels and into our neighbourhoods, at our expense, knowing the danger they pose, despite very clear warnings, is an act of absolute contempt that requires an equal and opposite reply. Britain is being radically changed without consultation or consent, while our votes are meaningless — and the ruling class rubs our noses in it, even dispatching the plod if we complain too loudly.

That is why it’s time to take this to the streets. You don’t have to like it, or even approve of it, but this is how it has to be now. There is no other way. Civilised means have failed.

The thing about this blogging game is that you can go from writer’s block at the height of Silly Season to being spoiled for choice. Naturally, Reform UK Ltd. is the gift that keeps on giving. Their conference has been less than successful, with attendees caught on camera physically assaulting a protestor, car crash interviews all round, more slop policy, and Farage digging the hole even deeper. On the face of it, Farage & Co are looking at a criminal investigation.

This, of course, is not outside the realms of expectation for anyone familiar with the territory but I've now seen a few Telegraph staffers perplexed as to how Reform could have walked so easily into an ambush. They’ve learned nothing over the years about Nigel Farage. Every single Farage-led enterprise has been a squalid, debauched, amateurish, sleazy, incompetent shitshow, and it all down to the fact that Farage has the morals of an alley cat.

That's one thing Rupert Lowe is absolutely right about. Farage is a pathological liar who prizes sycophancy over competence in the people around him, and has always been surrounded crooked stooges. Ukip was a gang, not a political party. The culture at the top of Reform is an exact reflection of his personal ethics. He is a dishonourable turd of a man with zero redeeming qualities - and you have to have lived in a cave for the last two decades not to notice it.

I certainly expect that applies to James Frayne, who writes in the Telegraph “The party must go further and purge the inner sanctum of the amateurs and clowns who have created a culture of perpetual stupidity”. Is this a longwinded way of saying Reform should wind up as a party? I mean, who would be left?

The one lesson in all this is that an organisation will ultimately follow the example set by its leader. If you have a grasping narcissist at the top, the organisation will take after him. Ironically, this is a lesson Reform could apply to its civil service Reform policies.

Meanwhile, you might have seen earlier this week that Danny Kruger has jotted down what he asserts the intellectual direction of Reform. It enjoys no official standing so more than likely it is just his fever dream and his boss won't even read it. And to be fair, I wouldn't even blame him - because you can take an educated guess what this boilerplate tract will say.

That said, some intellectual direction is better than none, and its as good a starting point as any being that the man is in the right ballpark, but that still isn't good enough. What's missing is technical policy competence and political nous. Reform has neither.

One example of this is the latest welfare and housing policy from Reform, dealing with foreign-born entitlements - when their data shows that more than half the problem is settled-status EU citizens, thus you are talking about relitigating/renegotiating Article 50 at the same time as upending the GFA by leaving the ECHR - without anything approaching a plan B for trade.

On that score, leaving aside how politically unpopular this will be, we can take an educated guess as to what their plan B looks like on the basis of the crap they churned out during Brexit - from idiotic blether about trusted traders to wilfully distorted interpretations of WTO law. You wouldn't let these morons run a whelk stall.

But that is not to say the Tories are any more capable. Fore sure, they do have a few half-serious MPs, but they've entrusted defence and foreign policy to Tugendhat and the ineffably stupid Obese-Jecty - which will leave Britain defenceless. What you have there is a Ukraine obsessed neo-con psychopath and a Galaxy Class moron.

I've been watching Obese-Jecty for quite some time, trying to discern what, if anything, makes him a conservative. I have to say, I've drawn a complete blank on that score. Whenever he counter-signals Reform, he defaults to leftist talking points. He is midwit liberal of the ilk that made it necessary to kick the Tories out in the first place. As such, whatever progress Badenoch has made, at the stoke of her pen, she's reset the clock and once again made her party unelectable.

Essentially, what will happen is that they'll be surrounded by similarly indoctrinated people - ex-army brass and defence consultants, all marinated in the latest fashionable battle formation dogmas and, like Labour, will throw vast sums of money at the defence industry to procure unproven and largely useless unmanned toys that WILL go over budget, and they will gut existing capabilities to pay for it. Neither party is fit for office.

Worse still you won't get better out of Restore Britain because they think the same way, and about half as deep. The entire British right is bereft of technical competence. Ironically, they could do with recruiting some senior civil servants as governmental advisors, because they routinely demonstrate they do not understand what is possible, or even viable. Sadly, the one thing that does unite the right is their allergy to strategic thinking.

That, though is just as well, I suppose. One of the reasons the right shouldn't want to win in 2029 is that Britain is actually too buggered to fix for the moment. I've just been going over Reform's welfare policy again (because it has some basic statistics in it), and I think they're wildly optimistic about the potential for savings, and the political capital it will cost them just to make marginal cuts. If the electorate has to choose between sate handouts and a functioning state they will opt for handouts every single time. Socialists designed the system that way.

At best (and only with some serious statecraft) the near term potential for cuts over the course of a few years is about £30bn before they start pressing buttons that will cost them voters - and that won't even dent the problem. Suppose we gave Reform their due, and they met their £50bn target, it still doesn't put UK public finances in good order.

To get even close to rescuing public finances, one or two nuclear buttons will have to be pressed, and that isn't going to happen. Way too many vested interests. There's a lot we can do to to insulate ourselves form future liabilities like reforming public pensions and further disability claims, and by addressing the triple lock, but we're not cutting our way out of this mess. Meanwhile, there is not a lot to be saved by gutting the civil service either. Maybe there's about £4bn to be saved without drastically reducing state capacity. There's maybe £6bn you can snatch from foreign aid, but that still doesn't get us very far. It's hard to see where the cuts could come from.

While a (wildly optimistic) £50 billion welfare saving is large, it is not large relative to a £130 billion-ish deficit, a £110 billion of debt interest, and an ageing population that keeps pushing state-pension and NHS costs up as a share of GDP. Hard questions will have to be asked about what we can reasonably expect of the NHS, but even asking those questions within earshot of the average British voter will cost you a majority. Just ask Theresa May.

The optimal path for the British right is to wait for Labour to plunge Britain into a deep financial crisis that puts us on major austerity measures as the condition of a bailout. Such a crash is coming whether we tinker with welfare or not. We might as well let Labour carry the can for it. Ultimately it's going to take a raft of pro-growth supply side reforms, but even then there are no shortcuts back to prosperity, not least because even the most sensible energy policy will take up to a decade to take effect.

Meanwhile, correct me if I'm wrong, I also think there's probably a major housing crash on the mid term horizon that could put the banks back into crisis. There are multiple crises now locked in. The die is cast. Britain is massively, massively screwed, and the electorate is the main thing standing between us and the necessary reforms. Unfortunately, they're going to have to get what they voted for good and hard before they'll consent to a change of course.

Elsewhere in the news today, feathers have been ruffled by a masked “far right” demo against illegal immigration in Dover. Though completely harmless, perhaps intimidating to some, it has attracted widespread condemnation even on the right, from figures such as Nigel Farage and Julia Dunning Kruger. This, though, is what you get when voting achieves bugger all, and when a political solution looks ever more distant thanks to crooked Farage and the ineffably stupid Rupert Lowe.

Some remark that causing disruption and annoying ordinary British people doesn't help anyone but I’m inclined to disagree. I don't really have a problem with disruption. It's a public nuisance, but that's all it is. Unlike the climate clowns, none of these lads would dream of blocking an ambulance. It's actually heartening to see so many out on the street. I attended a protest at Linton on Ouse a few weeks ago and only ten people turned up.

That said, I can see the reason why. Linton is a backwater, so any protest has to be visible and make itself noticeable. Dover is the epicentre of this mess and so that is where the protest must be.

I would not be at all surprised to see such a protest moving growing in size and strength to the point where it could even shut down cross channel operations, and I can't say I'd have any objection to that so long as they weren't violent. After all, economic disruption is the only leverage we have, and not all that different to going on strike. It is totally legitimate.

I'm not especially keen on the black clothing or face covering, but it is interesting to note the two tier dynamic in play again where this is what it takes for the "respectables" of polite society to finally call for a ban on face covering. But despite my disapproval, I can also see why - since the plod will right now will lock you up for the crime of posting a meme.

I would rather this was handled some other way, but the electorate has spoken often enough on the matter of illegal immigration, and yet the government still enables it. These chaps are done asking nicely, and if it wasn't a 300 mile drive, I might even join them. I may do in the future - and I won't be wearing a face covering. I don't have to share their grotty politics to recognise the threat this immigration poses.

What's interesting about the march is that it accomplished more in terms of sending a message than the last half dozen Tommy Robinson jamborees. I never could see the point of a street movement unless it struck fear into the hearts of pantywaist liberals.

While Reform is in full denial mode, there is no getting past the fact that their most senior officials and the party leader conspired to subvert the rules on party donations. Prime Ministers have had to resign for less. Jukes and Orr have already resigned, with Farage claiming they were just “contractors”. Farage himself may even be forced to step down as leader.

Either way, it’s a problem for Reform. Farage in the past has proven remarkably resilient to these media witch hunts but this latest episode reveals a culture of sleaze within the party that is a direct consequence of his leadership. Conservative Home says Reform has a “professionalism problem” when in fact it has a Farage problem. He has always been a careless, arrogant, sleazy tyrant, and the culture in the party is a reflection of him and his leadership.

I've always said that the institutional and pathological amateurism of Reform is the culture that Farage brings with him. It taints everything they do. He is the party and the party is him. It will never be resolved as long as he is leader.

But then, if he isn’t leader, Reform is just as cooked. James Orr (ironically a Cambridge professor of ethics) was said to be the big brain who would bring credibility and intellectual heft to party policy, but with him and Farage out of the picture, that leaves Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick as the only halfway credible figures. As a Tory defector, Jenrick can’t take the reins lest Reform look like a Tory breakaway faction, leaving Yusuf who is said to be abrasive and generally obnoxious. There is also the small matter that he not yet an MP, and there are no winnable seats up for grabs any time soon.

It’s entirely possible that most Reform voters won’t give a toss about this latest scandal. But prospective normie voters will - and potential donors will give it a hard swerve lest the stench of corruption rub off on them. If it costs them even one percent in the polls and caps further growth, it knocks Reform out of the game so far as forming a government is concerned. There is no spinning this. It’s a disaster for Reform. Regardless of the legalities, these are the worst possible optics.

It perhaps wouldn’t be so bad if this were the first matter of intrigue for Reform, but there’s still the matter of shady crypto donations and a general vibe of sleaze and incompetence around the party. There’s only so much you can casually brush off as establishment media hitjobs. This latest scandal is a goldmine for political satirists and a veritable ammo dump for Reform’s enemies on the left and right. It is also a gift for the Tory party, and one that eliminates any possibility of further defections. There will be some waverer Tory MPs breathing a sigh of relief today that they didn’t jump ship.

Most of all it is a huge let down for Reform voters for whom the Tory party is too tainted by its record of failure. They now have nowhere to go. Some may switch to Restore Britain, but that leaves the right even more hopelessly divided than it was before. This will further boost the anti-Reform tactical vote, probably gifting Labour a second term. It may even bring a general election forward.

We have yet to see the full fallout of this, but this is one that will linger. If the media smells blood in the water the same way they did when Boris Johnson was on the ropes, they will hound Farage until his political life is untenable - and it will likely spur further investigations. Reform people seem to know quite well how to launder foreign money - which suggests they've done it before.

The media was always going to go after Farage on the grounds of financial irregularities, and he was always going to make it easy for them. For my part, I just have to ask why didn't Farage just start up a vape shop like everyone else? Nobody investigates those.

It’s been a challenging few days for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party - beset with internal bickering over the ideological direction of the party. I’ll skip the gory details. It’s unimportant. Regular readers will know this was predicted. All of it stems from Restore’s fundamental definition problem, and if you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said Restore was circling the drain.

This morning, though, it would seem that the penny has dropped at Restore HQ. The party has published a paper entitled Restoring our Identity. Now we're getting somewhere. It's muddled, not very well structured, and poorly written (probably in a serious hurry), but it does set out a few basic parameters.

To understand the document it has to be read between the lines. It need not go into constitutional minutia. The document has an explicit purpose. It is a longwinded declaration that Restore is not an ethnonationalist party. Read in conjunction with their deportations paper, the party now looks like a cultural conservationist party - which is an adequate accommodation with ethnonationalism - and therefore supportable (if it can improve the quality of its policymaking). It is a less than subtle “fuck off” to the grotbag tendency, which makes it safe for more sane people to defect from Reform.

More crucially, this is the closest we've seen to an actual party definition. It is not optimal but it does adequately serve its function. It's somewhat ironic that I should welcome it given my usual demands for precision and detail, but it does what it needed to do. The intended recipients of that message are hearing it with full clarity, and are making their choices accordingly.

What it does is removed the ambiguity that's been present from the outset, making the party a target for the actual far right - which Lowe foolishly elected to ignore. Consequently, the party has a lot of reputational damage to undo which was wholly self-inflicted. Today's declaration may be too little and too late.

But it does neatly illustrate the point I've been making ad nauseum for the last year. Parties without an explicit definition are the authors of their own misfortunes - and this applies in equal measure to all of the parties of the right. Just the tiniest bit of ideological direction makes a whole heap of problems go away virtually overnight.

Of course, you can pick holes and split hairs with what Restore has written, and I may even get around to doing it myself, but to do so is largely to miss the point. A strategic compromise has to be made on the right to build a coalition. A clever one is one that requires some compromise from all sides - to unite the sane people who recognise the need to obtain power.

For those who think it's too much of a compromise, you would do well to recall that a purist nationalist party has been attempted several times and each time has imploded - sabotaged by people who are never satisfied. Even Homeland wasn't extreme enough for them so I don't understand why they ever thought a party led by Rupert Lowe would ever cater to their ideology.

This move from Restore, though, does not solve all of their problems. Many of the divisions hinge on foreign policy which has to be very carefully calibrated. It must also steer clear of the Danny Kruger variant of trad-Toryism and small state dogma. We do need to reform the state, but we also need it to do a lot of things of we want to repair Britain. It also needs a vision beyond twee agrarian nostalgia.

Whether or not there's the makings of a viable and credible party remains to be seen because a lot of the Slop Right's thinking is based on the same old cliches and mantras that bear little relation to the real world, and tends toward impractical and undeliverable macho soundbites.

As some have noted, this minor course correction puts Restore in the same ballpark as Reform - which is problematic, but not if the party chooses to compete on seriousness and competence grounds. For that it needs better people and better research.

For some time now, I've had a reputation for trashing Restore for its own sake, not having anything positive to say about it. But that's because all of its errors have been downstream of its definition problem. Just think of all the times Charlie Downes could have avoided making a complete prat of himself had they published this declaration at the beginning. How many unnecessary and unproductive Twitter spats could it have avoided?

With Restore having brought some remedy to that existential question, it is now likely that its messaging will be much more coherent, especially if they make greater use of their own policies rather than letting them gather dust. If they start getting it right then I will say so. It just angers me that it's taken all this wholly predictable bickering and bed-shitting for the penny to drop.

What is not known, though, is the extent of damage these months of philosophical incoherence have caused. While the grotbag tendency is but a minor faction within Restore’s support base, it is also the loudest and the most online of the Very Online Right. Today Restore has made an enemy of them and they’ll spend most of their days tearing Restore down - to no useful purpose. The next few months will be a test of their influence. Having spent so many months pandering to the very cohort they are now seeking to shed, Restore have created a rod for their own backs.

Meanwhile, for those who have asked what I mean by "grotbag nationalist", it refers to those who are openly antisemitic, dabble in Holocaust denial, and are comically bigoted in every respect - many of whom don't even think women should be allowed to vote - and would deport people exclusively on the basis of skin colour (though they'd emphasise deporting Jews first).

Moreover, they are ideological puritans, politically inept, and naturally predisposed to wrecking things when they don't get their own way. You could give them a party that was 95% aligned with their own ideology and they would still burn it to the ground in a tantrum. These are people for whom Homeland wasn't extreme enough. There is zero recognition of the need for strategic compromise. They are nihilistic idiots.

They're the ones who complain about "cringe civnat boomers" then rushed in to join a party led by Rupert Lowe - and have spent every waking moment agitating for Restore to become its ideological opposite - not least because they are incapable of starting and maintaining their own party. If your party panders to these people then it is hard-wired to self-destruct. They enjoy the infighting more than activism because they are pathological losers.

The grotbag nationalists complaining about Restore are the same ones who wrecked the Homeland Party. Kenny Smith, to his enormous credit, recognised the need for a new "sensible nationalism" that was sane and humane - which is the very reason I agreed to join. What that required was clinical precision in policy and terminology, and the website did a pretty good job of that. It also required a great deal of message discipline and self-discipline from its activists. Probably its greatest error was recruiting loudmouth egocentric e-celebs.

They were the ones who simply didn't recognise the value of carefully crafted and calibrated messaging and instead wanted the party to get its proverbial dick out in public, and demanded that the party was explicitly antizionist as a sine qua non - because that's their primary preoccupation.

It wasn't good enough that the party was explicitly nationalist with a well-constructed remigration policy (much of which is replicated in Restore's mass deportations paper). As such, they were looking for any excuse to wreck it, and when they found one, they did.

But they didn't start their own party - because none of them have that kind of organisational talent. Running even a small party is a lot of tedious unpaid administration, which would have interrupted their shitposting. They just waited to parasite off a new one - and Restore was the first viable vehicle that came along. Rats in a sack have more organisational ability than these people. Herding cats is relatively easy compared to managing a party with these people on board.

Worst of all is the abject failure to recognise that a party completely in line with their own demented politics would be terminally electorally insignificant. Do they seriously believe that Restore would be thumping ahead in the polls if only it were openly antisemitic and comically racist? If these people have decided to fuck off out of it, then Restore members should be celebrating today.

If you'd asked me last week I'd have said, objectively but reluctantly, that the Tories are the least worst option for the sole reason that they are capable of forming a halfway functioning interim government until such a time as there is a viable alternative. There is talent in the Tory party, and some fairly respectable MPs. But this latest reshuffle is a suicide note.

A party with Tom Tugendhat as shadow foreign secretary is nothing I want any part of - and is continuity uniparty in the worst possible way. He believes in fighting the Ukraine war to the last Ukrainian - without any doubt or scepticism - and zero thought to Britain's direct national interest. He is evangelical about it.

Just lately, certain events have re-awakened my interest in the Great War. I've always been more fascinated by WW2, with a more patchy understanding of WW1, so I've set about correcting that. It is still massively relevant to the world we live in today in terms of geopolitics, technological change and warfare in general.

As a foundation course I've just finished watching the 26 part 1964 BBC series (which feels about as long as the war itself). All the way through I kept wondering to myself how any side could bear witness to such wholesale slaughter and be unable and unwilling to stop it. It basically only came to a conclusion because both sides were running out of men. We destroyed an entire generation in the process - and it solved very little because soon after we were back at it - and never fully recovered.

This, especially, is why I'm not taken with centre right politicians who are just itching for a showdown with Russia. When our own government is waging a demographic war on the people of Britain, nobody should be in a rush to send British men to die over a scrap of Eastern European rust belt.

I'm not one who says Russia does not present a threat, but it is a threat that can be contained, and one that needs to be managed with great care. What we do not need is a warmongering zealot converting a regional border skirmish into a full blown proxy war without debate or scrutiny. This is something Peter Hitchens is absolutely right about.

There are those who have called for unity on the right in order to defeat Labour, but there is no point in that if that means a continuation of the same basic foreign policy posture. If that is the moral mission of the Tory party, ahead of safeguarding Britain's longer term interests and ensuring the survival of its people, then it must be kept out of power. We are done with the narcissism of liberal internationalism, and their corrupted idea of "western democratic values".

The further dimension to this is that defence policy is downstream of foreign policy. With Tugendhat steering foreign policy, it means an equally disjointed and wasteful defence policy. This does not end well.

This is where the zoomer nationalists are entirely correct. There is certainly nothing in it for them to die in a muddy ditch on the Eastern flanks - and if it is such an immediate problem for European security, it's for Germany to finally pay its colossal debt in blood - not us. As such, as ridiculous as the alternative right wing parties are, if they can knock a Tory MP out of the game, fill your boots. A pox on them.

This week there has been an outbreak of bickering among Restore Britain supporters, which seemingly started when a speech by Orla Minihane (that included non-white British girls as victims of grooming gangs) triggered fury from the hardliners who said “They aren’t our girls, who cares?”.

This triggered a robust defence of her from veteran Fair Fuel campaigner and Restore spokesman, Howard Cox - causing the gossip girls of Lotus Eaters to stick their oar in for no useful purpose. The drama triggered the membership resignation of one Steve Laws, de facto leader of the antisemitic faction of the online right.

Likely this will result in his supporters following his lead. There has been some disquiet in the ranks for some time with Lowe having appointed Henry Bolton as a spokesman, leading to the accusation that the zoomers are being elbowed out as the party become more of a watered-down civic nationalist party - the same way Reform did (as though it ever wasn’t).

This has left to wider squabbling. The precise details of who said what are not especially important but it is the wholly predictable consequence of the ideological schizophrenia in the party I have talked about since its inception. This has been a very avoidable running sore for Restore Britain - as a direct consequence of its failure to encode an official definition.

While Rupert Lowe could afford to spend some of his political capital by extending an olive branch to the Tommy Robinson brigade, no party can seen to be directly associated with borderline neo-nazis. I doubt Lowe understood precisely who he’s been defending in his ranks. Even temporary alliance with them proves unsustainable, and an electoral liability.

That said, I do have *some* sympathy with the zoomer nationalists on as regards to what they call the "cringe boomers" of Reform (and now Restore) because the boomers in question are former members of Farage's entourage, and inherently of the Ukippy ilk - and never particularly serious people even in their political prime. But at the same time, they did all rush to join a party led by (checks notes) Rupert Lowe. It's a bit like a vegan going into McDondalds and complaining they serve hamburgers.

One of the main reasons I joined the Homeland Party was because I'd come to the conclusion that the Tory Boomer Thatcherism of Farage and his entourage of ex-MEPs was a political dead end - and any party that was a Ukip derivative/offshoot would not prosper. Not necessarily because the ideology is faulty but because the Ukip stable (and its successor entities) has never produced a single serious politician. I don't think they ever came even close. It's why I advised Homeland against making any overtures towards Ben Habib before he started Advance UK. There was broad agreement on that point. Steve Laws himself said we need to step over them.

It somewhat baffling then, that (after wrecking Homeland) they all immediately charged to join Restore Britain when it was headed up by exactly the sort of Ukippy slop merchant they detest. Behind closed doors, they don't even take Lowe seriously, never mind Cox or Bolton.

This is the ideological clash I have warned Restore about from the beginning. But we should also recall that it is, primarily, a generational divide - where the legacy dissident right has nothing whatsoever in common with zoomer nationalists or indeed zoomers in general. They do not speak the same political language - and they do not operate from the same historical context. Boomers think Churchill is a national hero while the radical zoomers think he was a drunk who wrecked the empire and destroyed Britain's future. There was no scenario where this was going to make for an intellectually coherent, stable party. It's hardwired to self-destruct.

But now it seems the zoomers are taking their bat home, because the other side of the equation sees them as a fundamental liability (which they are). That then leaves Restore Britain as a Tommy Robinson aligned civant boomer party - which will never shake off its Ukippy amateurism or present a serious alternative to Reform, or pose a threat to them.

As such, all it can do is linger on for a while, harvest more engagement on social media, then fizzle out to nothing, just as the last three attempts have. The bottom line here is that neither faction of the radical right is capable of sustaining a serious political enterprise. Reform has cornered the market on slop, and we do not need another slop party.

I don't know if Rupert Lowe understands this, but his party is now at a crisis point. The departure of the crank right doesn't make remnant Restore electable in its own right. The more the grotbag nationalists desert it, the more it begins to look like a re-badged version of Advance UK with an ethnocentric tinge, not a million miles away from Reform in terms of vibe and ideology (insofar as it has one).

This, though (with a little work), could be an inflection point for Restore. Since there is no longer any point pandering to the grotbag tendency, it is much freer to define itself as something more palatable to the mainstream right. For that, it needs to do what it should have done from the beginning and set out a party definition.

Moving forward, it has to compete not on ideological grounds, but on seriousness and competence (not least because the ideological ballpark is the same as Reform). For that, it needs to see itself less as a political party and more of a troubleshooting squad, assembling serious people to develop serious policy - so it can say that unlike Reform, it has the talent and the knowhow to fix Britain.

Whether it can locate and attract serious people is another matter, and it's far less certain they can produce serious policy. The tendency on the right is to decide what must be done then pad it out with post-facto justifications - not caring if it works, just so long as it sounds plausible.

In all probability, though, the party will continue in its current vein because you're dealing with people who mistake social media engagement for electoral viability and commitment. They see no need to fix the foundations. That's always been Reform's problem, and the cause of most of its problems, and it's why Restore ends up making the same errors.

On that basis, there is no real point in the party existing, unless you take the somewhat cynical and jaded view that there's no point in the right winning unless its going to be relatively hard right on immigration. While that is a supportable view, parties seldom succeed on a nihilistic premise. You still need to be able to outline a positive vision. It can't be based on twee agrarian nostalgia.

If the crank right really are taking their bat home, there is a short window for Restore to rethink and reset, and do all the preparatory work it should have done in the first place. If, though, they carry on as before, still pandering to the grotbag tendency, they may as well pack up now.

On the subject of a party definition, one tweeter, Carl Wilkinson, has a more refreshing nationalist perspective…

Restore must first answer the constitutive question that precedes every policy dispute: who is the political community for which it intends to govern? Britain is not a self-created nation consisting simply of whoever happens to live within the state’s borders. It is a constitutional state resting upon older historic peoples (principally the English, Scots and Welsh), from whose inherited institutions, loyalties and consent its authority ultimately derives. Parliament did not create these peoples; their existence made Parliament and the Union possible.

Restore must therefore say whose inheritance it seeks to conserve and what obligations arise from it. Does the state exist merely to administer the present population, or does it owe duties of continuity to the peoples who created it? Those duties cannot end with defending borders or preserving monuments. They include maintaining the demographic, economic, institutional and cultural conditions through which a people can reproduce itself and transmit its inheritance. Without an answer to that question, Restore’s policies will remain disconnected reactions rather than parts of a coherent national programme.

Nor need this positive vision retreat into “twee agrarian nostalgia.” The object is not to preserve England in amber, but to restore England as a living and self-renewing nation: one in which the English possess a recognised political voice; young people can afford homes, marry and raise families; productive assets and public institutions are strengthened rather than consumed; and each generation expects to pass on a country more secure than the one it inherited.

Britain can survive only as the common political home of living historic nations, not as a deracinated administrative territory inhabited by an interchangeable population. Restore must decide whether it exists to manage that territory more competently or to restore the peoples and inheritance from which Britain draws its meaning. That is the distinction upon which its entire reason for existing depends.

This is as close as you'll get to a clinical definition of a nationalist party - one which I could support, but the problem on the right is not the "ism". Its the "ists" - for whom it is necessary for the purposes of in-group signalling to be overtly and comically bigoted, antisemitic and generally retarded, thus making a party based on this premise unmarketable to anyone with a basic sense of decency and has more than a collection of comics on their bookshelves.

Moreover, the doctrinal strain of British nationalism tends towards socialism, isolationism, anitzionism and other failed ideas, which is why nationalist parties tend to purity spiral themselves into a phonebox. As such, even temporary alliance with them proves unsustainable, and an electoral liability.

Further, the ideology is so very far from where the average normie voter is, it is necessary to meet them halfway and lead them to where you want to be - but the grotbag nationalist tends to view anyone not 100% aligned with their own dogma as a traitor, enemy and subversive. Such unserious people can never produce a serious party - and we have several attempts we can point to as proof of this.

There is also the question of the character of the British people, who are not generally well disposed to jingoism and overt displays of patriotism, not least due to the weight of half a century of liberal indoctrination and propaganda. As such, ideas have to be packaged and sold in such a way that it is safe to cross the proverbial floor. It is not done through clickbaity ranting.

The closest thing to a hybrid ideology is that of National Conservatism, which, while is generally viewed as a civic nationalist framework (within the spectrum of acceptability), can serve nationalist ends through well researched, intellectually consistent, precision policy. This is something that has to be done with wisdom and skill - or not at all.

An LBC clip has caused a stir on X. A young woman on PIP benefit says that jobs need to be meaningful. She is a clear example of a phenomenon known as elite overproduction. If the system were functioning, she would never have gone to university and never have been educated into a state of perpetual uselessness. She'd have found herself teaching at a local primary school, married, then had children of her own. Instead we funnel women into social sciences where they do the maximum amount of societal harm.

Some would have it that she is a clear candidate for one of Reform’s welfare chain gangs, cleaning up graffiti and picking up litter. In her case, they might have a point.

But at the same time, I do think she has something of a point. I am not unsympathetic to her plight. Not all jobs are worth taking just for the sake of having a job, especially if it isn’t sustainable for employee and employer. The churn is part of the reason why recruitment practices are so onerous. I am not a subscriber to the idea that you have to take any job even if there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Not every job leads to better things.

In this, I’ve had my fair share of experience. Before moving to the tech desk while doing a software engineering HND in night class, I worked in PC World on the shop floor with a commission rate of 0.01% where you were trained and expected to use aggressive American sales techniques on West Yorkshire people on a rainy Wednesday morning when they just wanted a printer cartridge. A third of the workforce quit in the first three month after opening - and rightly so. There was no fun it, no intellectual reward, no financial reward, and fuck all dignity in being lectured on your sales performance by some Blackberry-sporting regional manager with acne.

I'm not going to "champion" that bullshit. I want an economy where talented young people have the space to develop and experiment without having to demean themselves with bullshit menial work in companies that treat them like garbage. I don't demand our young people to lower their life expectations that far. This specious notion that any work is good work is a Victorian working class hangover we need to rid ourselves of, and start channelling young people into places where they can thrive.

Moreover, I don't think it unreasonable for young people who spend thousands on their education to have higher expectations of the labour market. The people who should be held accountable are those telling them that their social sciences degrees are worth the paper they're written on.

The lady in the video remarks that work can be good for mental health (helping to establish a routine and a work ethic) but she is also right in saying bad work can be detrimental. In fact, the unemployment system does make allowance for skilled people to find appropriate work before it imposes sanctions of any kind. The same should apply to any disability benefit - because forcing people into any old job regardless of its suitability can exacerbate mental and physical conditions.

The one way to ensure people stay in work is to help them into the right kind of work that's suited to their skills and temperament. The notion that any job is a good job only applies if its physically and mentally sustainable.

In my view, Reform's welfare for work policy amounts to little more than welfare chain gangs, coming from an entirely reactionary and vindictive place, but someone like this could be funnelled into charity office work like Citizens Advice (which can be both edifying and meaningful) which has a number of third sector career avenues.

This is more or less what I did. I was working a shitty job in PC World tech desk that was so miserable and abusive I quit, signed on the dole, and worked at a local disability charity for nearly two years. I built them a casework management system in Visual Basic - the first time I ever got my hands on a proper SQL server which gave me the skills I needed to later work at SSE, HBOS, Atkins and Airbus. It's been a net benefit to the taxpayer - and more useful to me than getting into debt for a useless degree. It just wasn't an official scheme. Forcing people into dumb menial jobs they can't actually do doesn't serve anyone.

As such, I think with a little adjustment, Reform's welfare for work policy could work. Right now it comes from a vindictive place - pressing young people into graffiti removal. A bit of joined up thinking would not hurt here. Most people on the right complain about taxpayer funding of charities, but a lot of charities are actually outsourced council service providers. If we want to cut what we spend on them (which we should) there should be a formal process whereby the can submit vacancies to welfare offices, that caseworkers can funnel claimants into.

Certainly the software development work I did for that disability charity set me up for the rest of my career. I also built a wheelchair hire database and a document management system, which provided me endless reusable code I deployed in other jobs. Call them third sector apprenticeships.

The bottom line is that there is always going to be a class of people much like this lady, who simply aren't useful to the world of commerce, and don't belong there either. The tough love approach doesn't really work in an economy where the deck is stacked against you and you're competing with immigrants to do intellectually stultifying work that isn't even financially sustainable. These are not the days when boomers could fall out of school and into a career path. Once you leave the system now, you are left to your own devices, with massive competition for any job - and there is zero career progression.

As far as disability is concerned, I think its right that we recognise that some able bodied people for a myriad of complex reasons just aren't able to do a normal jobs. I can't. I'm "on the spectrum" and I need several hours of solitude in a day in order to function. My Substack and other writing gigs on the side pays me just enough that I don't have to sign on and don't have to do a bullshit office job. I actually would rather starve than go back into software development - because I have done it to death. But it took me a while to find this niche.

You will get no argument from me that some people do just need a kick up the bum, and I am not saying that there aren't shirkers, but I do respect the fact that not everybody is cut from the same cloth, and the system has to show some flex in recognition of that. We help them to find an appropriate way to contribute.

Working on the presumption that every NEET is a workshy scrounger is a faulty premise - and I think everybody loses if we're shunting people into unsustainable menial work. A good system is one that can tell the difference.

I could bore on at length on this particular subject having been a product of NEETism myself, in a working class Yorkshire culture where it was the norm in my peer group. Instead of republishing my X writings on the matter here, I asked Grok to look at todays posts and collate into a basic NEET policy...

A Manifesto Policy for NEETs: Matching People to Contribution, Not Chain Gangs

Britain has nearly a million young people aged 16-24 who are not in education, employment or training. In April to June 2026 there were 981,000 NEETs, or 13.0 per cent of the age group. That is 30,000 more than a year earlier, even after a modest quarterly fall. Among 18- to 24-year-olds the rate stands at 15.2 per cent. Young men account for most of the recent rise. These numbers are not an abstract statistic. They represent talent left idle, skills unrecognised, and a welfare system that too often treats every claimant as a workshy scrounger who simply needs a shove into the nearest menial job.

The assumption is false and costly. Disabled young people are more than three times as likely to be NEET as their non-disabled peers (29.6 per cent versus 8.7 per cent). In recent data, 45 per cent of NEETs aged 16-24 were classed as disabled. Autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions feature prominently: among disabled NEETs, autism is one of the most common reported conditions. Autistic people of working age have an employment rate of only 34 per cent, compared with 55 per cent for all disabled people and 82 per cent for the non-disabled. Most want to work. The system is not designed for them.

The Problem with “Any Job Is a Good Job”

The old industrial-era idea that any paid work confers dignity has become a justification for placing people in roles they cannot sustain. Call centres, aggressive retail sales, warehouse shifts and generic office “team player” environments destroy motivation for those temperamentally unsuited to them. High turnover follows. Employers waste time on compelled applications generated by Jobcentre rules. Claimants cycle through failure, sanctions and deeper inactivity.

This is not an argument against work. It is an argument against unsustainable work. Some people need a firm push. Others, including many who are neurodivergent, highly skilled in narrow domains, or simply mismatched to the commercial office, require space to find a niche that uses their actual abilities. Forcing the second group into the first group’s solution produces neither taxpayers nor fulfilled lives. It produces more PIP claims, more long-term sickness, and more young people who would rather starve than return to a soul-crushing job they have already failed at.

Labour-market conditions have made the mismatch worse. Entry-level work has been compressed by cheap labour, automation and AI. Casual jobs that once let teenagers experiment and build habits have dwindled. Housing costs and wage stagnation mean even “skilled” early-career roles often fail to deliver independence. Telling bright 20-year-olds they must accept any vacancy or face destitution is not realism. It is a refusal to design a system that can tell the difference between idleness and incompatibility.

Principles for a Better System

A serious NEET policy starts from three facts. First, NEETs are heterogeneous. Some are work-ready and need only opportunity and pressure. Others need time, matching and a different kind of contribution. Second, contribution must be real. Society is entitled to expect something in return for support, but the something should build capability rather than merely punish. Third, the labour market itself must become more fluid so people can try, fail and move without being trapped.

The policy therefore combines carrot and stick, detection of ability, and structural reform.

Third-sector social apprenticeships.

Local charities and community organisations already deliver many outsourced council services: advice, disability support, casework, IT systems, document management. They should submit vacancies and structured placements to welfare offices. Caseworkers would match claimants to roles that use existing skills or develop new ones. A claimant who can build a database or manage case files contributes more, and learns more, than one picking litter. After a defined period the placement can convert to paid work or a recognised apprenticeship. Social charities should be predominantly volunteer-run where possible, reducing their grant dependency while creating a genuine pathway. This is not extra spending. It is redirecting existing welfare and charity budgets toward productive activity.

Skills recognition, not just conditionality.

The current system is poor at spotting latent ability. A young person who spends days building PCs from scrap or writing code for a local group is treated as idle. An effective service would identify those strengths early and route people toward compatible environments rather than the nearest warehouse. For those on disability benefits, the same principle applies: suitability matters. Forcing someone into work that immediately worsens a physical or mental condition is both cruel and fiscally stupid. Time-limited, supported job search for appropriate roles should precede sanctions, just as the unemployment system already allows for skilled claimants.

Labour-market fluidity.

Restore casual and part-time work for teenagers so they can experiment without formal contracts or high compliance costs. Cut employer National Insurance and reduce labour-market regulation that makes hiring and firing expensive. People stay in bad jobs because leaving is risky and alternatives are scarce. Fluidity lets them test different work without the fear that the next vacancy will be worse. It also reduces the flood of low-quality applications that burden employers.

Contribution with meaning.

Long-term claimants who are work-capable should contribute. The contribution should not default to performative community punishment. Placement in a functioning local organisation that needs skills such as administration, technical support or advice work meets the reciprocity test while building a CV that private employers will actually value. Those who refuse reasonable matched placements after support and time can face sanctions. Those who cannot hold conventional commercial jobs but can still contribute in structured settings should be enabled to do so.

What This Replaces

Punitive “welfare chain gangs” such as graffiti removal, litter picking or generic community service assigned without regard to ability treat symptoms while ignoring causes. They generate resentment, high dropout and little lasting attachment to work. They also ignore the reality that some people are temperamentally unsuited to the modern commercial workplace and will never thrive there. A system that cannot distinguish the workshy from the mismatched will keep producing both.

The alternative is not open-ended welfare. It is targeted matching plus labour-market reform. Young people who take longer to find their feet, the ones who bounce between agency jobs, quit abusive retail roles, or spend years on the dole while quietly acquiring real technical competence, should not be written off. History shows many later become net contributors once they land in the right environment. The cost of getting that matching wrong is a lost generation of potential plus a growing disability bill.

This approach also addresses the third-sector problem. Many charities now operate as contracted service providers rather than grant-dependent campaigners. Formalising a pipeline from welfare into those organisations simultaneously supplies labour, develops skills, and lets government reduce poorly targeted funding. It turns a source of complaint into a delivery mechanism.

Britain does not lack work that needs doing. It lacks a welfare and labour-market architecture that can place the right people into the right work without first grinding them down. Nearly a million NEETs is the result of treating everyone as interchangeable labour. A manifesto that wants lower welfare spending, higher employment and less wasted human capital must start by recognising that they are not. Match first. Then enforce. Then let the labour market itself become flexible enough that people can move when the match is wrong. That is how you turn personal failure stories into net fiscal and social gain.

Three posts in one today. Probably the most off-putting thing about the Tory party is the absolute unquestioning devotion to sustaining the Ukraine war. It's most prevalent in a number of midwit Tory backbenchers whose depth of understanding is wafer thin. They think this all started in 2022, and there is no moral or political complexity to it. Nobody is looking at the longer term geo-strategic national interest. As Britain sleepwalks into a food and energy crisis, nobody is looking for the off ramp.

For Europe, there is a collective interest at stake here. We have Turkey (a NATO member) seeking to replace Iran as the powerbroker in the Islamic world, an unresolvable predicament in Iran, and heightened tensions with China. Europe needs Russia as a third party intermediary, but all we're doing right now by giving Ukraine deep strike capabilities, is feeding the war of attrition that is cannibalising European energy and food infrastructure while driving Russia into the arms of China.

None of this factors into the thinking of the centre-right who continue to align with the EU neighbourhood policy of bringing Ukraine into the Western fold, even though EU members will veto membership and NATO membership is a long way off. Neither is likely to happen unless either or both organisations ignore their own accession rules, in which case serious questions have to be asked about their viability and credibility.

Instead of looking for a viable off ramp, the Westminster consensus is that there are no consequences for facilitating the escalation of the conflict, thereby dragging Britain into a hybrid war without even passing comment on it, let alone holding a debate about it.

The thinking in the Tory party appears to be no more sophisticated than “Ukraine good, Putin bad”. While you can reduce it to such simplistic terms, there is still the matter Britain's own interests, none of which are served by setting us up for a new cold war than demands defence spending we can ill afford. We can act to safeguard the territorial sovereignty of the Baltics, while ensuring Ukraine has the means to defend its own lines, but turning this war into a de facto proxy war is insanity - especially over a scrap of ethnic-Russian wasteland.

Regardless of your view of this conflict, it ought to be a matter of concern that HM opposition is not asking even basic questions about government policy towards Ukraine, particularly as Burnham struts around LARPing statesman while the British economy circles the drain, and Labour continues to dismantle our own armed forces.

Reform's housing muddle

Housing policy, probably more than any other policy area, gives you an insight into the economic philosophy of any party. You would expect to see a commitment to massively expand social housing from the Labour Party and parties like the Lib Dems and SDP. To then see a similar proposition from Reform, while everything else in their threadbare policy stack points to low tax, small government conservatism (the Kruger tendency), suggests that the party has no coherent philosphy. What you're looking at is a purebred populist party.

There's a lot wrong with Reform's housing policy, not least the lack of vision. The last thing I want to see is yet more sprawling newbuild housing estates, and especially not built to some disjointed notion of affordability. That's pretty much a continuation of the last twenty years or more, which sees more land gobbled up by identikit shoeboxes without local amenities - which still aren't affordable - and you wouldn't want to live in them even if you could afford one. And that's leaving aside the fact that Reform's numbers don't stack up at all.

An actual conservative party would focus more on removing the the barriers to housebuilding and removing market distortions. Instead they're introducing more. Social housing in itself is a market distortion. For me, the entire concept is obnoxious - and that's leaving aside the fact that the cost of bricks and materials is only going to go up.

Moreover, Reform is setting eye-catching arbitrary targets, the same as any other party, when all other parties have failed for a myriad of complex reasons. It makes no sense to set yourself up for failure, especially when nobody serious believes you can do what you say you will.

As such, it is reasonable to deduce that there is no serious thinking going on inside Reform, there isn't a coherent economic philosophy, and like the the parties, are punting half-baked ideas that simply aren't credible. As such, Reform loses any right to claim they are a radical alternative. It's more of the same scattergun policymaking without a strategy - and the results would be much the same.

A poll yesterday has Reform backsliding by two points, putting the Tories only one point behind them. They are all over the place this week, with announcements, press conferences and “policies”, and no one seems to be listening to them. They are not making waves. While it seems to have sunk in that a political party probably ought to have policies, the point of policies is not to have a stock of chum to throw in the water. It is to provide purpose, consistency and direction to all party activities.

As a piece from the Great British Think Tank puts is, "The problem isn’t simply that government taxes too much, spends too much, regulates too much or gets individual decisions wrong. It is that government increasingly seems incapable of seeing the economy as a system. Policies are designed vertically, in silos. One department solves its problem, another department solves another, the Treasury finds some revenue and another minister announces an intervention. Each can be defended independently. Then they all collide horizontally in the real economy, and nobody appears responsible for the collision".

This entirely describes the intellectual muddle Reform is in. There is no concept of joined-up policy or effects-based policy strategy. everything is done in silos for immediate electioneering purposes. Nothing they announce conforms to any kind of plan and half of what they announce will be walked back when nobody is looking. Reform announced yesterday that people forced to wait over 30 minutes on the phone to HMRC will receive £30 in tax credit at the end of the tax year. Nobody told Jenrick about the Cobra Effect. But more importantly, how does this square with Kruger's ambition to gut the civil service?

While Reform devotees assure us that Reform is professionalising and that it has very clever people working on policy, it actually looks like nothing has changed and, in some respects, the party is regressing. The idea that Reform would be any less shambolic than “the establishment” is laughable.

Clouston departs

Elsewhere in politics, many on X are reeling from the sudden resignation of William Clouston, leader of the SDP. A man of great integrity and wisdom. One of the reasons I never joined the SDP, apart from having a couple of pretty major philosophical disagreements with the party, is that there is only so much bandwidth for alternative parties, and the media is only interested in them if they're threatening or a source of drama. The SDP is neither. Its only option was/is to build slowly and locally, according to a long term plan - and even then, the prospects are limited.

For the most part, the political landscape is dominated by what is essentially a civil war on the right as it fragments between three equally dysfunctional parties. That is the main source of drama and entertainment for media and social media punditry - among people who are more interested in gossip than policy and outcomes.

On that basis, I don't blame Clouston for bowing out. A man can't be expected to keep giving of himself in the knowledge that his efforts are increasingly futile. For as long as the Slop Right are hogging all of the political bandwidth, and while there is no market demand for anything serious, you are well advised to find something more profitable to do with your time. There's not much point in building an alternative when people don't want an alternative. For the most part, they are entirely satisfied with slop. They do not expect or demand better, and lavishly reward those who produce it.

Something a little bit different today. A few years ago, a friend and long time reader, Niall Warry, gave me a three part recording of an interview with his grandfather, Brigadier Bertram Upton Sinclair Cripps CBE MC, who fought in the trenches in WW1, and in the air as part of the Royal Flying Corps. He also served during the Second World War commanding 8th Infantry Brigade 1942-1944 and then as Military Governor of the Naples area 1944-1946.

The recordings are a harrowing first hand account of combat on the ground and in the air - absolutely unimaginable horrors. Not by any means easy to listen to.

These recordings have been available, though surprisingly unnoticed, on my YouTube channel for some time now, but I’m re-releasing them today. When I first uploaded them there was a lot of background recording hiss from the tape. With my limited audio editing skills I was able to reduce much of it, but it’s never been ideal, though with the emergence of AI, a follower on X has kindly processed them for me - and it’s a major improvement.

Owing to restrictions on YouTube I couldn’t replace the audio on the existing clips so I’ve had to upload them afresh, but I’ve left the old versions up just for the sake of keeping the original unedited recordings and comments intact. The new versions I present here below. Despite the audio enhancements, it’s still quite a difficult listen because the original recording quality wasn’t great, so you have to listen carefully. They require and deserve your full attention.

These are of great interest to me personally, not least because of my very deep interest in fighting aircraft, but also because they sparked an entirely new interest in WW1. What surprised me especially was the scale of the air war. With the flying machine in its infancy, I’d always assumed the air war was limited in scale, but the more famous examples of WW1 biplanes were built in the thousands.

Ever since I heard these recordings, I’ve made a point of knowing more. WW1 biplanes may superficially look like primitive box kites, but they were in fact precision manufactured weapons of war. Moreover, while we celebrate “the Few” of the Battle of Britain, the men who flew in WW1 were every bit as brave and heroic. A chapter in history we must not neglect. Three quarters of Britain’s pilots were killed or rendered unable to fly, and until the final year of the war were not permitted to carry parachutes. While Brigadier Cripps’s career is most impressive, that he lived through it at all seems nothing short of miraculous.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

See also this obituary sent to me in the post…

See also, this…

Today Reform formally released their housing policy. The party has pledged to prioritise British-born young workers for social housing and to build 50,000 new affordable homes per year.

I’m not minded to delve too deeply into their ten page PDF because they’ve already told me what I need to know. Reform is doing what all parties do - pledging to build more homes to an arbitrary target. Pure populism. Left-wing populism as it happens.

Social housing is the very last thing we should be building. The long-term objective of housing policy should be to restore a functioning housing market in which the great majority of households can meet their needs through private provision. In such a market, large-scale social housing would become largely unnecessary. The current model, which treats social housing as a major part of the housing system rather than a limited safety net, creates more problems than it solves.

Social housing necessarily involves rationing. When homes are offered at rents significantly below market levels, demand will always exceed supply. There is no truly fair or objective way to allocate subsidised housing. Means-testing, points systems, and priority banding all involve subjective judgements about who is most deserving. These systems are open to manipulation, inconsistency, and accusations of unfairness. They also create strong incentives for people to present themselves in ways that maximise their chances of receiving a subsidised home, rather than focusing on improving their own circumstances.

This rationing system tends to produce a race to the bottom. Because access to social housing is determined by assessed need rather than ability to pay, it rewards dependency and penalises self-reliance. Households that work hard, save, and avoid falling into difficulty often find themselves at the back of the queue, while those who remain in the system for longer periods can secure better properties. Over time, this dynamic concentrates people with multiple disadvantages in the same areas, creating clusters of welfare dependency that are difficult to escape.

These problems are not new. The large social housing estates built in the post-war period were designed for a very different economy. Entire districts were built around major employers such as mines, shipyards, steelworks, and large manufacturing plants. These industries provided stable, well-paid employment across generations, often within walking distance of the homes. When those industries declined or disappeared, the economic foundation of these estates collapsed. What remained were concentrations of unemployment, low skills, and welfare dependency, with few local opportunities for work. The physical legacy of that era continues to shape housing policy today, even though the economic model that justified it no longer exists.

Modern attempts to expand social housing repeat many of the same mistakes on a smaller scale. Building more homes at heavily subsidised rents adds permanent liabilities to the public finances. These properties typically require ongoing subsidy for maintenance and management, and the capital invested in their construction is never recovered through rental income. Each new social rent home adds to the stock of assets that lose money every year. This approach treats housing as a form of permanent welfare rather than as infrastructure that should, over time, pay for itself.

The existence of a large social housing sector also distorts the wider market. By removing a significant number of homes from the market and offering them at below-cost rents, it reduces the incentive for private developers to build homes at the lower end of the market. It also creates political pressure to maintain high levels of housing benefit to support those in the private rented sector, which in turn pushes up rents for everyone else. The result is a system that protects existing social tenants while making it harder for younger households and new entrants to the market to find affordable accommodation.

A better approach is to focus on increasing the overall supply of housing across all tenures. When the market is allowed to function properly, through planning reform, faster decision-making, and the release of suitable land, more homes are built at a wider range of price points. This reduces pressure on both the private rented sector and the social sector. As overall supply increases and prices moderate, the need for large-scale subsidised housing diminishes. The role of social housing can then be limited to providing temporary or targeted support for those who genuinely cannot access the market, rather than acting as a parallel housing system.

This does not mean abolishing social housing entirely. There will always be a small number of people who, due to age, disability, or severe disadvantage, require long-term supported accommodation. However, this should be a residual function, not the default response to housing need. For most working-age households, the goal should be to help them move into the mainstream market rather than locking them into subsidised tenancies for decades. Lifetime social tenancies at heavily discounted rents create strong disincentives to work and save, and they prevent the turnover of stock that would allow new households to be housed.

Reforming social housing also requires confronting uncomfortable realities about its current performance. Many social housing estates suffer from poor management, high levels of anti-social behaviour, and weak communities. These problems are not primarily caused by the physical quality of the homes, but by the concentration of households with complex needs and limited economic prospects. Simply building more of the same model will not solve these issues. A smaller, better-managed social housing sector, focused on those with the greatest need and combined with stronger expectations around behaviour and contribution, would deliver better outcomes at lower cost.

The current trajectory, which treats the expansion of social housing as a central part of the response to the housing crisis, is unsustainable. It adds to the fiscal burden without addressing the underlying shortage of homes. It creates unfair rationing systems and long-term welfare traps. And it preserves a model of housing provision that was designed for an economy that no longer exists. A serious housing policy must instead prioritise the measures that increase total supply across the market, reduce long-term dependency, and allow social housing to return to its proper role as a limited and targeted form of support.

I certainly didn’t make any friends with last night’s post. There’s been a flurry of protest over on X about it. I have not yet seen a fully formed rebuttal though. There won’t be one either – because it is a fact that the Slop Right in its current form is not capable of forming a coherent, stable government. The only party of the right that could is the Tory party. That’s not an opinion, it’s just a plain fact.

Whether I could, should or would vote Conservative is another matter. I am open to the possibility, but wouldn’t come out strong for any part of the right at the moment. What I can say is that there are examples of Tory MPs doing what I want them to do. Helen Whately is digging into welfare policy while Nick Timothy is campaigning against those who would impose blasphemy laws upon us. There’s a good few Tory MPs just getting on with the job – and I cannot say the same of any Reform MP.

Reform, meanwhile, keeps showing us that it is a purebred populist party. Its Channel pushbacks policy is not lawful or workable. They’re just not putting the work in. What strikes me about Reform’s housing policy published today (a mere ten pages) is how lacking vision and curiosity it is. It amounts to simply building more council houses – when what’s needed is a more holistic approach to rebuilding places, starting with repopulating and regenerating our towns rather than adding more urban sprawl on a long defunct socialist model. It does not address any of the structural problems in the housing market, not least the barriers to downsizing, thereby freeing up family homes, or any recognition that as the boomers die off there will be a glut of family homes.

The emphasis on expanding social housing also distracts from the real barriers to supply. Planning delays, excessive regulation and restrictions on land release continue to limit new construction across all tenures. These barriers are not free to remove, but removing them is far cheaper than subsidising below-cost housing indefinitely. Speeding up decisions, cutting unnecessary rules and allowing development on suitable urban and brownfield land would increase the total number of homes without adding to the subsidy bill.

I’ve seen enough now to know that Reform does not understand the purpose or the utility of policy, and I have abandoned any hope that the Slop Right will up its game. Where Restore Britain is concerned, they’ve had ample time to demonstrate they’re something different and better, but we now see it emerging as a far right populist party in terms of who it seeks to attract relative to where the average normie voter is. It is not a winning prospect.

I know this because, unlike the obsessive ranty right wing bores on X, I do occasionally leave the house and meet people who are not in my right wing bubble. Where the average normie is, compared to the internet addled right winger, is quite a gap – and as such, the message must be calibrated to persuade rather than deter.

There are millions of professionals out there with real jobs, who don’t have the time or the energy to invest in politics, and will maybe read the BBC at work, a few Facebook pages, the odd Triggernometry podcast in the car, and the occasional politics book from Waterstones, where the most conservative thing they’ve probably read is Rakis Ehsan’s book on identity. They probably do think Tommy Robinson is a “far right thug”, and most can’t name more than a couple of serving cabinet members at any given time.

They aren’t revolutionaries. They just want things to work better and for things to be cheaper. They want controlled immigration but they don’t want fleets of ICE vans on the street. As such, the job of a radical party is to put together a policy prospectus with skill, that will put us on the road to where we want to be rather than shitting the bed and complaining that the system is rigged.

For that, you need policies and a plan, presentable and persuasive people who can master a brief, and leadership people can relate to. Can you look me in the eye and tell me any of the Slop Right parties fit that description? No.

Ultimately, they are judged by what they produce. Contrast Reform’s bullet point slop with the Wolfson Review (first class research) that informs Badenoch ECHR thinking. Meanwhile, Badenoch’s policy commission on culture and integration is being led by Toby Young and Robert Tombs, which stands a chance of being realistic if not as ambitious as I would like.

Reform, meanwhile, has only produced one attempt at a policy paper in its whole time of existing, which amounts to welfare chain gangs and witless tinkering with PIP. You can bet a testicle they did not consult anybody on the front line of the welfare system as to how that might play out.

Moreover, policy should dictate leadership architecture. Laila Cunningham was recently humiliated on national TV because the party had nothing to say in response to the Defence Investment Plan, because the party has no defence policy at all and no defence spokesman. You don’t need any insider contacts to know that Reform is an intellectual shambles. If Reform does have an “impressive policy team” there is no outward evidence it exists.

It’s also worth noting, not for the first time, Reform’s policies are bumping into the TCA and the Brexit settlement. There is a similar conflict in their welfare policy – yet nowhere do they outline how they see that playing out. If they intend on ripping up the entire Brexit settlement, they should say so explicitly and set out what their alternative trade model is. It is not trivial and demands serious answers.

If you are going to be a radical party, then you must recognise your policy has radical consequences, for which you must have anticipated the problems and come up with compelling answers. There’s no sign of that anywhere on the right. Even the Tory plan to quit the ECHR raises more questions than it answers.

These are not conclusions I’ve arrived at on a whim. As readers will know, I started writing about Reform in early 2024. It was clear the Tory party was underperforming, and had lost its sense of purpose. An alternative was needed.

At the time, Reform wasn’t making any waves. It was circling the drain, failing to make any headway under Tice and Habib. It had nothing going for it, and no purpose of its own. The obvious flaw was that it was called Reform but still had no concept of what it would reform or how. The name implied some kind of democratic overhaul and a constitutional reset but the policy prospectus (if you can call it that) was a collection of recycled Ukip talking points.

I raised this issue. To cut a long story short, I didn’t get anywhere. I shouldn’t be surprised. Populists don’t see a problem with populism – especially when they’re leading in the polls.

But here it is helpful to understand why such a party exists in the first place. Why is there such animosity towards the Tory party? A big part of that is the sense of betrayal. A great deal of hope was poured into that party in 2019 on the back of Brexit and several years of the right being side-lined. Cameron ruled from the centre much like his predecessors.

The reason it went so badly wrong is rooted in Brexit. Delivery did not meet expectation. As a Brexit realist I always thought they were unrealistic expectations, and even when I campaigned for it, I imagined it would not make a whole world of difference – but said from the outset that it was especially likely to be kicked into the long grass without some sort of long term plan. I wasn’t wrong about that. When Boris Johnson came into office, the policy cupboard was bare.

On that basis, I have taken a very dim view of loudmouth populists who agitate against the establishment without a properly developed vision of what replaces it. I can just as easily see a Reform government winding up the exact same way – having made wild promises it could not deliver on, struggling to implement ideas that were never very sound to begin with.

As one of the earliest and most prolific critics of Reform, this didn’t go down very well. I am no stranger to being persona non-grata on the right, because I got the same treatment when I made the same points about Vote Leave Ltd. But I wasn’t the only one to notice that Reform was, putting it bluntly, crap.

You will recall a broadside by a certain ex MEP turned MP when he said “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power. Reform’s plan is to ride the protest wave, faced with two obscenely unpopular mainstream parties, but offer absolutely nothing constructive – chasing power for the sake of power”.

Hallelujah, I thought to myself. At least somebody gets it. For a moment there, I honestly thought I might have succeeded. The trickle of dissenting voices became a flood. But what we got instead was yet another dismal populist cult of personality with nothing approaching a serious plan.

I persisted with the usual critiques, optimistic that the penny might drop, but Restore was formed on a whim, with no planning or preparation and key foundational steps were overlooked – with very predictable results. In both parties we have empty vessels that will struggle to withstand the departure of their respective leaders, both of whom are living on borrowed time politically.

While this cycle of events has only been three years, for those of us who’ve documented much of it, it’s been an eternity. Looking at where we are now, compared to where all this has come from, the populist right has regressed. Shortly after the general election, in the back rooms of Westminster think tanks, there was talk of developing a full programme of policies centred around a Great Reset, but most of that work has evaporated and we’re back to transactional policy announcements which are forgotten the very next day.

Insofar as the populist right has any policy written down, most of it is just an extrusion of their existing talking points, most of which trace back to Ukip. It was lightweight risible toss back then and it still is. What also hasn’t changed from Ukip is the endemic pathological amateurism.

As I’ve explained many times, the reason you bother to develop policy is so that when you take office, you have a workplan you can start implementing on day one. The reason Andy Burnham is treading water and talking about gimmicks is because he doesn’t have a plan either, and he will pay a price for it, just as Starmer did.

As such, you can bitch, whine and moan to me about how bad the Tory party was, but you can’t convince me that we’ve fielded a viable alternative. I also note that the people who support these slop parties are the very same people who put Boris Johnson in power – and ignored all the warnings then.

What you likely get for your trouble is a government so inept that it crashes and burns within two years, marked by a succession crisis, much like the Tory party following Johnson. That then leads to a complete implosion of the right, ushering in something worse than the Labour party. The lessons are all there to be learned, but nobody seems very interested in learning them.

I’ve seen enough now to know that the Slop Right is never going to get its act together. Reform could very easily blow it to come out of the next election with fewer than fifty MPs – and the party is in such a state that they better hope so because a sudden mass influx of largely unvetted novices causes as many problems as it solves. Just ask the SNP. In any turn of events, there will have to be cooperation with the Tory party because the party has institutional memory and knowledge that Reform simply doesn’t have.

That then brings us full circle, to assess whether the Tory party has learned its lesson, and whether it has changed. The answer to which is... yes, to a point, but not nearly enough. What we do see, though, is some star performers in the background getting on with it rather than fighting like rats in a sack. I do appreciate Badenoch’s disdain for soap opera. If forced to choose, I’d rather have stable mediocrity than a gaggle of unvetted cranks who don’t know how anything works.

If you ask me, the entire right is an intellectual wasteland, and all of the big beasts of the right are tired and tainted. We certainly don’t see the precision and ruthless zeal of the Thatcher years. The entire right is beset by an “it’ll do for now” mentality, while the serious work is completely neglected. The chief reason the right won’t win in 2029 is because it doesn’t deserve to. It is left to the rest of us to do the unfashionable thing of treating politics as a serious craft rather than a purity contest or a content farm.

The only reason I ever bothered to critique the alternative right wing parties was in the hope that they would take some of it on board and evolve into something more credible. For a time it seemed like I was making progress but I must have been deluded. If anything they’ve regressed, and I’m persona non-grata as far as the Slop Right is concerned. Whatever it is I thought I might accomplish, I failed.

On that basis, any further critique I might is is really just a thought exercise largely for my own purposes. We’re not voting our way out of this. For the insurgent parties to be of use they have to offer something more compelling than the establishment they seek to displace. But when it comes down to it, there’s a fact that many on the right, myself included, will not like at all. With caveats, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party is the party of the right most capable of forming a viable, stable government. It would not be an optimal government, but a vast improvement on the last go around even if they just implement their reversal of Net Zero.

That singular fact influences how I will probably vote at the next election. Looking locally, I have a fairly reliable Tory MP who is well liked, knows the system, doesn’t waste his time on social media, responds to letters, and his politics are in the right ballpark even if I think he’s too mainstream. I’m not inclined to trade him in for some ranty unvetted paper candidate of no local standing who has no real idea how government works. If I vote at all, he’ll get my vote, but not with any great enthusiasm.

I could vote for a more radical party but only if it were serious and showed some sign of organisational capability. But looking at the options, the alternatives can’t even competently run their own parties let alone a government. I’m not going to vote for a party whose policies were scribbled down on a fag packet over boozy lunch. I am not going to vote for a party that hasn’t done its homework.

I haven’t yet seen what Badenoch’s Culture and Integration Commission has to say, but I have seen Lord Wolfson’s report on the ECHR - and if that is the standard of work we can expect (even though I do not believe we should leave the ECHR) then it is streets ahead of the alternatives.

When it comes to policy, I’m not taken in by fanciful blank slate ideas. Every proposal has to acknowledge the environment in which it has to operate, and the kind of opposition it will face. Governments do not have absolute power, and most only ever a chive a fraction of what they want to do. As such, I judge a party on its realism and its priorities.

For me, the absolute priority is immigration. On that score, I have looked at the proposals from the dissident right and I do not believe they understand the playing field at all. Yusuf’s plan to deploy the Royal Navy looks to me like a gimmick that won’t withstand first contact with reality. As to Uncle Rupe, I rather get the impression that neither he nor his supporters have even read their own policy. Once you start pulling at the loose threads, it soon falls apart. There is a certain Ukippy tinge to their thinking.

You don’t need to tell me how bad the Tories were in office or how little they achieved, nor do I believe they have changed enough. I don’t trust them. But we’re still back to the original point. They at least capable of forming a government where the alternatives are not.

Despite what the polls say, the Tories still have strong regional roots and most of the MPs who survived the 2024 purge will keep their seats in 2029, not least because they’ve put a lot of work in locally. They each know they are fighting for their political lives, and have made an effort to be seen on the ground. Meanwhile, Reform just puts on glitzy rallies and rolls out their tainted leader. There will be shy voters who won’t put their head above the parapet to explain their choice, but will quietly conclude that the alternatives aren’t up to scratch.

When it comes to elections, campaigns tend to focus people’s attentions, and will assess the parties more objectively. Badenoch is popular, and her supporting acts (Philps/Lam/Timothy/Whately et al) are a cut above the populist dross. They’re putting the work in. Contrast these people with Sarah Pochin (well meaning but dim) and Richard Tice. Draw your own conclusions.

I would prefer a competent party somewhere in the ballpark of Rupert Lowe, but his party is a Trojan Horse for grotbags and comically bigoted idiots for whom the competence mountain is too steep to climb. As such, it is for Reform to use the time remaining to prove they aren’t a shambolic populist mess. But that requires leadership - which they simply do not have. Thus, I am left to conclude that the Tory party is the only vehicle left standing - as depressing as that is. I’d like an alternative, but what else is there?

It is conceivable that Reform could evolve into something plausible were it to spend some time as the official opposition, preferably under new leadership, but as it stands it could not form a government. It does not have the breadth or experience. If forced into a coalition, they are going to need the Conservative Party. Regardless, my futile search for an alternative is over. Any hope of the alternative parties getting their act together is throwing good money after bad.

Last night I listened in on a nationalist space (Twitter radio) comprised mainly of Restore Britain supporters - and I am now more convinced than ever that Restore will implode. Whether the nationalist know it or not, their ideas conform to a doctrinal British nationalism and it is fundamentally at odds with the personal politics of Rupert Lowe and some of the more prominent party spokesmen, not least Howard Cox and Henry Bolton. Not only do they not understand the ideological friction or why it matters, they still don't see what problems it will create for the party.

As I'm prone to repeating, the test of these Slop Right parties is whether they can withstand the departure of their leader. On that basis, Reform UK is not in a good way because the party is built around the whims of Farage - but that also goes for Restore Britain.

Policy wise, insofar as Restore has documented policy, it's mainly reactionary right stuff with a Thatcherite tinge, and at some point, there will be a pivotal policy position that its own members simply cannot live with. (They agreed that support for Israel is a deal breaker). They will put up with it for as long as Rupert Lowe is useful to them, but that won't last - not least because it can't.

One of the chief problems is Rupert Lowe himself. He is an old man, he is slowing down, and doesn't have the stamina for being a public facing figurehead. Nationwide electioneering is a much younger man's game (Farage did his tour of duty when he was a younger man). He can remain a figurehead for so long, but eventually has to hand over the running of the organisation to people who don't share his ideology at all.

That's a problem because that immediately leads to a purity spiral and a purge, at which point they will attempt to shape the party more in the direction of doctrinal nationalism, shedding the ex-Reform/Tory base as they go. The fact that doctrinal nationalism has been an electoral flop every time its been tried doesn't seem to factor into their thinking.

Put this to them and you won't get a coherent answer. You'll get more of the same hostility, defensiveness and denial - followed by misdirection and obfuscation. You can bluff and assert your own interpretation of what the party is, but certain ideas belong to certain ideologies, and there is no disguising the conceptual conflict.

Moreover, I don't even think this conflict is recognised or understood at the top of the party. If it is, they are turning a blind eye to it for political expedience, in order to lean on the support of nationalists. This is much like the ERG right being in the same party as One Nation Tories. They simply do not rub along together - and in power would spend more time fighting each other than the opposition.

The ideological divide also extends to their main preoccupation; Immigration. Ethno-nationalists detest civic nationalists, but Rupert Lowe himself is a civnat. They will turn on him eventually. They are entryists just biding their time - because they're not capable of starting and maintaining their own party.

This is a problem that won't go away for Rupert Lowe. He's adopting the line of "We don't care" when it comes to the conduct of his own support base, but you can only really get away with that if the media accusations are largely spurious. Vessels like The Telegraph are throwing buckets of shit to see what will stick, and the problem for Rupert is that a lot of it will stick - and politics is a reputation game.

It is also a persuasion game. There are moderates who can be talked into a harder line stance on immigration, but not if your party is a breeding ground for far right ideologies. Just listen to one of their spaces. There is no attempt to conceal their antisemitism - and with that goes a lot of grotty politics than anyone well adjusted human will cross the street to avoid.

The extent to which this cohort makes up the activist base for Restore is not known, but it can be said to be significant in all the online spaces journalists inhabit. Moreover, when there is such a major ideological gulf between key figures, the media will use wedge gossip to provoke infighting. They do it because it works - and they have seen Restore coming a mile off.

On the whole, I get the impression that Restorers just aren't very bright. There are rules to this game, and they don't know them. To give Farage his due, he at least knows which ponds not to fish in - and that's partly why he had to put the kybosh on Lowe's freelancing.

For Restore, there are just too many open goals and too many obvious contradictions for there to be any longevity in it. Moreover, the average voter knows that Reform are their only real chance of sticking it to the man even if they like Rupert Lowe. As Restore limps on they will start to realise that while the do like and agree with Rupert Lowe, they don't like the company he's keeping.

Meanwhile, things are not rosy over on Reform Street. While flurry of gossip columns this week can be put down to a sour grapes campaign by Tim Montgomerie, rather a lot of it seems highly plausible. It is inconceivable that there isn’t a succession debate at the top of the party - and Zia Yusuf will be the topic of conversations. The Farage cat has used eight of his nine lives.

To me, Yusuf looks like the only viable option to replace Farage because it can’t be a Tory defector. Reform would then look like what it is. A breakaway Tory faction. But I don't think Yusuf has got what it takes. His politics are in the right ballpark but he's a cold fish as far as electioneering goes. There are a great many who won't put up with him because he's a Muslim - and will defect to Restore, while there'll be others who find him too confrontational and will drift back to the Tories.

Losing Farage will see Reform backsliding in any case, losing a lot of momentum in the process - at which point the Tories will harden up their rhetoric. The populist right looks very vulnerable right now, and could even implode before the election. The media knows this and will do everything in its power to make it happen. A lot rests on whether Farage can explain away a £5m crypto donation.

I’m of the view that all of this is downstream of the original sin of failing to build an intellectual foundation that can withstand the departure of the leader. For both Restore and Reform, an implosion seems more a question of when rather than if. It speaks to the lack of leadership ability in both parties.

Now I'm back off holiday I'm having a more detailed look at Reform's welfare policy. I'm just looking at the Welfare to Work section first (welfare chain gangs). For a document padded out to fifty pages, they don't actually provide much detail on this, and of what there is, I don't get the feeling they ran this past anyone with genuine field experience.

They say... "The local authority would receive a grant of £3,200 per claimant per year to cover the cost of administering the programme, supervision, and training the claimant for their task. If a local authority could not find adequate work for claimants in its area, it could assign them to a neighbouring area. In addition to the local council managing and supervising these tasks, registered charities could apply to manage scheme participants. This would allow good causes, whose importance has not hitherto been recognised in funding decisions, to benefit while expanding the list of possible functions”.

That to me sounds like a feeding frenzy for local "charities" and training providers - especially those entities whose main income is form local government grants. Moreover, I think they're wildly underestimating how much supervision this is going to require if they can even get it up and running without endless legal wrangling. It's going to cost a lot just in terms of insurances and public sector unions will also have their say. It might even be that councils can't afford to implement this policy.

Refrom then says "Reform takes implementing their will seriously. Accordingly, councils that refused to implement this policy, failed to find sufficient placements, or failed to monitor scheme participants’ performance effectively would be penalised with lower or no central Government funding. We will also legislate to make its implementation a legal duty for councils"

This not a serious proposition and actually, the one priority for any future right wing government is to remove statutory obligations on spending.

They go on to say "We estimate that the economic value of the work done by each claimant would be £9,000 per year, of which 50% might be expenditure that the council would otherwise have to incur. The remainder would deliver additional services to the community."

I don't buy that for a nanosecond. This is going to be an extremely expensive operation, more so in urban areas where many, if not most, participants will be reluctant and unwilling. Reform says "Failing to participate, absenteeism, poor performance, or on-the-job misconduct would result in immediate sanctions. This could include the full non-time-limited revocation of benefits. This would be a much harsher sanction than those in previous workfare programmes both in Britain and abroad".

That's the pivotal bit where this entire policy falls over. When hit with sanctions you will probably push misfits into destitution, while pushing miscreants further out of reach and into organised crime. Moreover, it speaks to the spirit of this entire policy as a punitive coercive measure rather than actually helping people into appropriate work.

Personally, I would write this entire scheme off as a bad job because it will not survive first contact with reality, but it could be made to work if it had a different ethos. If these work programmes amounted to apprenticeships then it would be a different matter. If they are viewed as chain gangs (which they will be), you will get more attempts to frustrate and subvert the system from all sides.

If you're dealing with perpetual shirkers with an attitude problem, then the work is closer to that of the probation service, in which case the task is to identify troublemakers and troubled individuals and get the the help they need and expose them to possible career pathways.

This, I think, could work in conjunction with a national service type programme where young people, particularly from deprived backgrounds can be put on boot camps, but with enriching activities such as rifle range shooting and route-marching. Give them a taste of a structured life with possible career avenues into the armed forces. It would not be a requirement for all. Just those who show no sign of constructively engaging.

In other circumstances, you might be dealing with addicts or people who simply do not have the right temperament for normal jobs. This is an opportunity for early intervention, treatment and life coaching. If this policy is set up with the welfare of claimants in mind, rather than just punishing them with menial punitive tasks then it stands a chance of working - but on that basis, you have to assume it is going to be much more expensive.

That, though, is not what Reform has in mind. It starts off on the populist premise that long term claimants are inherently lazy and workshy. In many cases, you're dealing with people who aren't temperamentally suited to the normal model of work, who perhaps have more creative instincts, who just can't find a channel for their skills. People who have largely been failed by the education system and slipped through the net.

As such, with a policy like this, you have to look at it from a more holistic perspective - as an adjunct of NEET policy, funnelling people into appropriate skills training, but also examining the ways in which the existing education system is failing.

What Reform have done here is just take one of their usual Slop Right talking points and bloated it to a few pages. As a piece of policy work it is ill-founded and poorly researched - designed to look macho for an equally clueless boomer audience. This is electioneering, not policy work. Crap, basically.

I have argued for some years now that the right needs detailed, structured policies but with both Restore Britain and Reform UK, that’s just not what we’re seeing. They’re going all out to create the illusion that they’re putting in the work, but everything they publish can still be boiled down to their usual array of tropes and soundbites. As such, they are engaged in a campaign of deception. None of this work withstands any scrutiny.

This does not bode well for Reform. As I understand it, Karl Williams and Sam Ashworth Hayes (both very capable policy people) are currently on board with Reform, but there is no evidence they’ve been able to influence policy output. This latest outing has Jenrick’s name on it (who usually utilises good research), but it reads like something Farage and Lee Anderson scribbled down over a boozy lunch. There is no sign of the professionalisation we’ve been promised.

Just skim reading this latest work raises a number of pretty basic questions. Good policy should anticipate and answer these questions - and the quality of a policy rests on how compelling those answers are. That is the measure by which they should be judged. That they operate on the presumption that nobody will look any deeper is extraordinary arrogance. They take us for fools. It’s enough to convince their own voter base, but serious people will remain unconvinced that Reform is capable of forming a functioning government.

Blogging wise I’m on light duty this week since I’m on holiday in deepest Somerset and baking in the August heat. It’s too hot to think this week - which is just as well because no serious thinking is required to dismantle Reform welfare policy, published today. As far as it goes, Doctor Johnson's dog springs to mind. Regardless of what's in it, that they've attempted it at all is something of a small wonder. My breath is not entirely wasted.

Before I go further, I must confess that welfare is a difficult area of policy and I’m a long way from satisfied with my own work on the Manifesto Project. If you looked at that chapter and thought it was rubbish, you’re not wrong. What I will say is that Reform and others are quite right to say that current levels of welfare spending is unsustainable. I’ve just not yet happened upon the right answer as to what to do about it. Reform’s foray, though, is less than compelling.

First off the bat, Reform is saying this is a comprehensive policy at fifty pages long, but as with Restore Britain’s efforts, much of it is padding, and if we’re being generous, only thirty pages of this document are actually of substance. It will be later in the week before I can do a more comprehensive review but there are two certainties this policy. It will not save as much as they think it will, and it will not be as easy as they think it is. It will also cost them more political capital than they'll have.

Their Welfare for Work policy, meanwhile, in which welfare claimants will be expected to perform duties such as litter picking and leaf/grate clearing, will not survive first contact with reality - and will likely cost more to administer than it saves. They're essentially talking about welfare chain gangs, which is Restore level slopulism.

The optics, for starters, don’t sit well. Around London, work squads will be predominantly unwilling black participants (often from rival gangs/ethnic origins) who will require additional training, security and supervision. You can also expect union protests because it should be paid work. If it's a job, make it a job. If not, it's just punishing young people for being out of work.

With any attempt at policy you have to assume that nothing you come up with is especially original, and that it has probably been tried or considered before, and if we're not doing it there's a often good reason. That is certainly the case with Welfare for Work schemes - as this blog has touched on before when Rupert Lowe mooted the same concept. In politics especially it is unwise to assume that you can make things work where others have failed.

The point for me is that a Reform government is not likely to have an absolute majority, and should not attempt reforms that will prevent them from being re-elected. Fix the foundations of the labour market first. Save the controversial stuff for when you have more power to play with. Policy that assumes absolute power and an absolute mandate is fantasising.

Their PIP reform, meanwhile, will create endless bad press. There will be massive assessment backlogs - because there always is, and it will be worse in poor areas. We will see endless edge case front page stores in The Mirror - just like the Bedroom Tax. It’s political suicide. Reforms have to be longer term and much more subtle. Ultimately, if you want to do something about the welfare bill, you have to increase the availability of work and make it pay. Tackle that first. One thing Reform would do well to keep in mind is that many of their disability benefit reforms will have major implications for their own voters base.

As to the proposal to ban all foreign nationals from receiving benefits, this is something I support in principle, and in fact, this is the key part of the entire policy. It certainly puts the writing on the wall. Under the proposals, foreign nationals will no longer qualify for Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, Pension Credit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Benefit, free childcare, or disability benefits. This, they say, will save an eye-catching, save £21bn per year.

The devil, of course, is in the detail. No doubt this will mobilise every activist lawyer, charity and NGO in the land, and will be subject to endless legal challenges. A lot of it is contingent on being able to pass primary legislation. While Reform believes leaving the ECHR will remove the main obstacles, the main pushback will come from settled EU citizens, and the EU will do doubt have something to say about it. Nigel Farage has tweeted “Those with EU settled status account for 58% of foreign welfare claimants. Reform will ban them from Britain's welfare state”.

Veterans of the Article 50 era will recall how the rights of EU citizens was a key pillar in Brexit negotiations, and this move runs the risk of collapsing the entire TCA, or incurring trade penalties. While I think this is an inadvisable course of action, not least because EU migrants are the least of our problems, there is a principled case for doing so, but the implications are huge. We need to see what Reform’s contingency plan is. I doubt their thinking has evolved much beyond the "WTO rules” shtick of 2019. That there is such a gaping omission is not a trivial oversight.

What troubles me about this policy is that it’s the work of Robert Jenrick, and it falls far sort of the standard I would expect from him having read some of his prior works. It suggests he was only as good as the researchers he had working for him in the Tory party, and suggests that Neil O’Brien was the real brains behind Jenrick’s slick presentation.

I will no doubt have more thoughts on this, especially as I further develop policy on the Manifesto Project, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the last few days of my holiday in Somerset. The main take-home point today is that Reform is finally putting meat on the bones of their tropes and slogans. While that is good news, the results are not promising. What we’re looking at is extruded verbal material that hasn’t been stress tested, and has little chance of succeeding. As such, loathsome though they might be, it still looks like the Tory party is the only party of the right capable of forming a halfway functioning government. This policy does little to change the perception that Reform is an unserious party.